By Saturday the camera crews and television trucks had all disappeared from the University of Virginia, where students took advantage of a sunny afternoon to throw footballs and Frisbees on the field known as the Madison Bowl, and a band played to a big outdoor crowd at a fraternity house farther up Rugby Road. The last live remote may well have been one Friday evening in which a reporter, standing on the patch of sidewalk where Martese Johnson was bloodied early Wednesday morning, told her viewers that the “talk of the Grounds this afternoon” was Virginia’s 79-to-67 win over Belmont.
But the widely seen video of Mr. Johnson being held face down on the sidewalk and handcuffed by three Virginia Alcoholic Beverage Control agents after he had been denied entry to the Trinity Irish Pub will undoubtedly continue to enrage the university’s African-American community, as well as many others, for months to come. It has also brought new prominence to concerns that black students here say they have been raising for years — about the small number of black faculty members and administrators at the university; about a curriculum that black students say aspires to be “international” but remains overwhelmingly Eurocentric and upper-class; and about the mostly-unspoken history of an institution whose famous first buildings were constructed in part by slaves.
The owner of the Trinity Irish Pub told The Cavalier Daily on Saturday that Mr. Johnson, a popular 20-year-old black student who is a member of the university’s prestigious Honor Committee as well as the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity, had seemed sober and merely “disappointed” when he was asked for identification at the bar’s door and refused admission — not “agitated and belligerent,” as the ABC agents said in their arrest report. They charged Mr. Johnson with obstruction of justice and with “profane swearing or intoxication in public.”
“He grabbed his ID and walked away — it was business as usual,” the bar owner, Kevin Badke, told the newspaper. “I went back to carding other patrons that were coming in, and then I heard a commotion. I turned around, and he was on the ground.”
What prompted the agents to stop Mr. Johnson remains unclear. Teresa A. Sullivan, the university’s president, asked Gov. Terry McAuliffe on Wednesday to order an investigation into whether the agents — who had warned the bar owner in advance that they would be scrutinizing the establishment on St. Patrick’s Day — had used excessive force in the incident, and the governor quickly agreed to do so.
Students here noted that ABC agents were also involved in a 2013 incident in which plainclothes agents surrounded and drew a gun on a 20-year-old white student, Elizabeth Daly, in the parking lot of a store where they thought she had purchased beer. It turned out to be canned sparkling water. Last July the state paid Ms. Daly $212,500 to settle a lawsuit she filed in the wake of her arrest.
Longstanding Problems
But in last week’s case, the agents’ apparently disproportionate response — Mr. Johnson’s head required 10 stitches at the university hospital after reportedly being banged on the sidewalk — linked the incident in people’s minds to high-profile police killings of black men in Ferguson, Mo., and New York, said Maurice Apprey, the university’s dean of African-American affairs and a professor of psychiatry. He and Marcus L. Martin, a professor of emergency medicine who is also the university’s vice president for diversity and equity, released a statement on Wednesday saying they were “outraged by the brutality” against Mr. Johnson.
And while ABC agents do not routinely patrol Charlottesville and have no ties to the university, many black students saw what happened to Mr. Johnson as one more piece of evidence proving what they have long insisted: that the university has a long way to go before black, Latino, and Asian students feel as welcome here as their white counterparts.
“What happened to Martese was tragic and traumatizing, but we had problems long before he was brutalized,” said Chukwudumebi Joy Omenyi, president of the Black Student Alliance, in an interview Saturday afternoon. She said she and others raised their voices last week — at a rally, at a question-and-answer session with representatives of the governor and several law-enforcement agencies, and in impromptu marches around the campus — both because they’ve been reminded how easily black students’ blood can be spilled for no apparent reason and because they want to create “a better place for all of us,” a place she would one day send her own kids to without hesitation.
“That’s really at the heart of everything we try to do,” she said.
Ayrn A. Frazier, who heads the Black Student Alliance’s political-action committee, said most black students understood when they decided to attend the university that they would feel “very much aware” of being at a wealthy, predominantly white university in the South, and that they would often be the only black student in a class, or one of only two or three. “I can only speak for me and for others I’ve talked to,” she said, “but the experience of a black student at this university is very much like that at any white institution. The social life is very separate because of the friend groups people have.”
Ms. Omenyi said the university has “a very vibrant black life,” with more than three dozen black organizations creating a community within which black students feel at home. And while many black students socialize comfortably with white students, in the classroom black students may feel isolated, she and Ms. Frazier said.
Undergraduates were likely to have at best a handful of courses with black professors over four years, they said. Hiring more black faculty members is particularly important, Ms. Frazier said, because professors “are here so much longer than any student,” and can have so much more of an impact on the institution.
Another concern is the curriculum itself, where Ms. Frazier said the university needs “fundamental changes” to explore contributions made to history, culture, and science by nonwhite people. “How truthful and honest is a Eurocentric curriculum?” Ms. Omenyi asked.
Links to Slavery
She also said courses need to be “truthful and honest about who Thomas Jefferson was” — a slaveholder who believed black people were inferior to whites. “It’s OK to complicate Jefferson,” she said. She added that the only physical recognition of work done by slaves during construction of Jefferson’s famous “academical village” was a small plaque in front of the Rotunda.
Black students are also concerned, she said, about a variety of related issues. Just as the university is now adding mandatory sexual-assault training, it should train students about “implicit” racial bias. Another topic of concern is making sure all university workers are paid a fair living wage — including the people, many of them black and some of them employees of contractors, who feed the university’s students and hospital patients and clean up after them.
“When we look back through the BSA archives,” Ms. Omenyi said, “the things people were pushing for in the 70s, 80s, and 90s we’re still pushing for. Black students integrated the university in the late 1960s and have been asking for the same things since.”
The students aren’t alone in seeking changes. One of the most passionate speakers during the question-and-answer session Friday was a middle-aged white Charlottesville resident who told the law-enforcement representatives assembled on the stage that what had happened to Mr. Johnson was “insane” and was “an unbelievable overreaction” that he could hardly imagine having taken place in Charlottesville.
“Something’s gotta change, sir,” he said to the local police chief, Timothy J. Longo. “I just really hope it will.”
Correction (3/26/2015, 5 p.m.): An earlier version of this article incorrectly referred to the Black Student Alliance as the Black Student Association. The article has been updated to reflect the correction.
