Civil rights icon Rep. John Lewis said the University of Oklahoma students caught on video chanting racial slurs should be expelled.
“They should be gone,” Lewis, a Georgia Democrat, said Tuesday on CNN’s New Day. “It’s unbelievable in this day and age on a college campus.”
A video of University of Oklahoma students in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity chanting lines like “there will never be a ni**** in SAE” was published by the student newspaper this weekend after it was sent in anonymously. The fraternity chapter has since been banned from campus and its charter revoked.
Lewis’ remarks came days after he returned to Selma, Alabama, with President Barack Obama and more than 100 Democratic and Republican members of Congress to commemorate 50 years since “Bloody Sunday,” when Lewis and other activists faced brutal violence from local police officials as they marched for civil rights.
Lewis applauded the swift reaction of the university’s president David Boren, a former U.S. Senator.
“I think he’s taken the necessary steps,” Lewis said.
