About The Black List.
The story of how a small college town in upstate New York became the home to the longest continually litigated civil rights case this country has ever seen.
It all began in September 1992, when an elderly woman living in Oneonta, NY reported that in the middle of the night she had been robbed and attacked. Although she did not see a face, she did inform the police that the assailant was a young black male and that he cut his hand during the robbery.
This led to a school administrator at SUNY Oneonta granting the police request for a list of the 125 black men who attended the school. Police used that list to track down every black student on campus and downtown, questioning the young men and demanding to see their hands.
An outcry from the students and community over the release of this list caught the attention of the national media. Protests and demonstrations were held to show that the student s felt their civil rights were violated. Eventually, the incident fell into the court system which led to the longest continually litigated civil rights case in American history…
