Richard Collins III was about to graduate from Bowie State University on Tuesday. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the US Army. He was airborne certified. He was a son, a friend, and active in his church.

To Sean Urbanski, a University of Maryland student, he was black. At around 3 am on  Saturday, May 20, Collins waited for an Uber ride along with two friends who were students at UMD at an on-campus bus stop. Urbanski walked up to them, and, according to witnesses, said, “Step left, step left if you know what’s best for you.” Collins simply replied, “No.” He stood his ground. Urbanski then stabbed him in the chest and fled the scene. Collins died at the hospital.

Make no mistake about it—this was a lynching, a lynching committed by a UMD student. A lynching 10 minutes from my damn house. Urbanski, as has been widely reported, is a member of a racist Facebook group called “Alt-Reich: Nation.” But that’s also not all he is. He’s a college student who grew up in the leafy suburban environs of Severna Park, Maryland. He hung out at Adele H. Stamp Student Union, studied at McKeldin Library, and wore his Baltimore Ravens gear around campus. He was not an interloper or an outsider. He is a homegrown terrorist who grew out of the soil of this college campus.

The sooner that the administration and the student body reckon with that reality, the better. The UMD campus has seen racist chalkings, nooses, flyers, and threats since Donald Trump took office. And yes, one would have to be willingly obtuse to not see a direct line from having open white supremacists in the Oval Office to the emboldening of the perpetrators—not just at UMD but, according to NPR reporting, at campuses across the country.

Let’s see whether Trump, with his pro-military, pro-troop rhetoric, has anything to say about the lynching of a soldier in 2017.

Collins’s killing was caught on video and is already being investigated as a hate crime by the FBI. At a press conference, UMD police chief David Mitchell had an appropriately visceral reaction to what took place. He said, “Anyone who feels empowered by what happen, the only thing I can say is that if you want to harm our students, you are going to have to go through us. We are not going to tolerate any harm brought to our students. Not on my campus. Not on my watch.”

That’s all well and good, but if this is going to end at UMD, it will be because students, faculty, and campus workers say enough is enough, not only to the hard right festering on campus but to an administration, led by President Wallace Loh, that has been all too content to look the other way.

According to several UMD undergrads, although it’s the end of the semester, direct actions are already being planned to ensure campus safety and uproot the monsters in their midst. Undergrad Brendan Sullivan captured a shared sentiment among students in a message to the school’s president on Facebook, writing, “Hey Wallace Loh, Through your failure to address racism, white supremacists, hate speech and violence against people of color you have created an atmosphere where racists are emboldened. Your milquetoast attitude to the racist flyers, calling hate speech ‘free speech’ and refusing to stand by immigrants, who you yourself are, has allowed this disease called racism to root itself in our university. We need courage, we need our administration to fearlessly fight for the lives of our students, not cover their asses and hide in their shell. Richard Collins’s blood is on your hands.”

There is a fight now that needs to be joined. Every available resource needs to be mobilized. Pretending that the murder of Richard Collins III is somehow an isolated incident will only make the situation worse. The FBI is not some anti-racist battalion. Without a mobilization against all forms of white supremacist hate, more innocent blood will spill.


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Dave Zirin, Press Action's 2005 and 2006 Sportswriter of the Year, has been called "an icon in the world of progressive sports." Robert Lipsyte says he is "the best young sportswriter in the United States." He is both a columnist for SLAM Magazine, a regular contributor to the Nation Magazine, and a semi-regular op-ed writer for the Los Angeles Times.

Zirin's latest book is Welcome to the Terrordome:The Pain, Politics, and Promise of Sports(Haymarket Books). With a foreward by rapper Chuck D, the book is an engaging and provocative look at the world of sports like no other.

Zirin's other books include The Muhammad Ali Handbook, a dynamic, engaging and informative look at one of the most iconic figures of our age and What’s My Name, Fool? Sports & Resistance in the United States (Haymarket Books), a book that is part athletic interview compendium, part history and civil rights primer, and part big-business exposé which surveys the “level” playing fields of sports and brings inequities to the surface to show how these uneven features reflect disturbing trends that define our greater society. He has also authored a children's book called My Name is Erica Montoya de la Cruz (RC Owen).

Zirin is a weekly television commentator [via satellite] for The Score, Canada's number one 24-hour sports network. He has brought his blend of sports and politics to multiple television programs including ESPN's Outside the Lines, ESPN Classic, the BBC's Extratime, CNBC's The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch (debating steroids with Jose Canseco and John Rocker), C-SPAN's BookTV, the WNBC Morning News in New York City; and Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.

He has also been on numerous national radio programs including National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation; Air America and XM Radio's On the Real' with Chuck D and Gia'na Garel; The Laura Flanders Show, Radio Nation with Marc Cooper; ESPN radio; Stars and Stripes Radio; WOL's The Joe Madison Show; Pacifica's Hard Knock Radio, and many others. He is the Thursday morning sports voice on WBAI's award winning "Wake Up Call with Deepa Fernandes."

Zirin is also working on A People's History of Sports, part of Howard Zinn's People's History series for the New Press. In addition he just signed to do a book with Scribner (Simon & Schuster.) He is also working on a sports documentary with Barbara Kopple's Cabin Creek films on sports and social movements in the United States.

Zirin's writing has also appeared in New York Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, CBSNEWS.com, The Pittsburgh Courier, The Source, and numerous other publications.

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