September 28, 2025
Hazing, notably at HBCUs, has acquired extra consideration lately due partially to incidents just like the one which occurred to Southern College scholar Caleb Wilson.
Fort Valley State College has suspended its Blue Marching Band amid hazing allegations. FVSU’s Govt Director of Advertising and Communications, Britney Smith, instructed WGXA that the college directed the band to “droop all exercise attributable to allegations of hazing” on Sept. 25, simply earlier than the college’s Homecoming Week.
Based on their report, the announcement got here simply earlier than Fort Valley State’s contest in opposition to Tuskegee College, which the crew received 27-20. The victory marked the primary below new head coach Marlon Watson, who beforehand served on Prairie View A&M’s teaching employees and was named Fort Valley State’s head coach in February 2025.
Smith continued, “FVSU takes acts of hazing and allegations of hazing critically and the matter is being investigated. The security and well-being of our college students and Wildcat neighborhood are all the time our high precedence. Presently, no additional particulars can be found.”
Fort Valley State was lately ranked because the primary public HBCU in Georgia by U.S. Information and World Report.
The information comes just a few months after the BBC reported that Caleb McCray, a 23-year-old member of the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, and bandmate of slain Southern College A&M scholar Caleb Wilson was charged with manslaughter in reference to the dying of Wilson in February 2025.
Hazing, notably at HBCUs, has acquired extra consideration lately due partially to incidents just like the one which occurred to Wilson.
Though Southern College appeared to not take motion in opposition to its band, it did, nevertheless, expel the Beta Sigma chapter of its Omega Psi Psi fraternity from collaborating in Greek life on campus after its investigation of the hazing incident.
The investigation decided finally that the fraternity, not the band, was at fault for the off-campus hazing that occurred in the course of the try to pledge Wilson into the fraternity that tragically concluded together with his dying.
Within the 2017 Netflix movie “Burning Sands,” an account of hazing on the fictional Frederick Douglass College is depicted by Gerald McMurray, the movie’s co-writer and director, who can be a member of the Omega Psi Psi fraternity.
Based on Andscape, McMurray was impressed to create the movie by the 2011 dying of Robert Champion, a Florida A&M College drum main who was killed in a hazing ritual and whose household was later paid $1.1 million by the college in a settlement.
Not like Wilson’s dying, nevertheless, Champion died throughout a band initiation, not a fraternity pledging incident gone tragically flawed.
McMurray, a Howard College alum, instructed Rotten Tomatoes, he needed to create dialogue by way of his movie.
“I needed to inform a narrative to create a dialogue,” McMurray famous. “I needed to indicate younger black males at a Black school and the challenges they undergo on the trail to manhood. If you happen to haven’t seen the entire film, don’t cross judgment. There’s extra to this film than hazing. The brotherhood and the household I acquired made me who I’m however that’s what separates pledging from hazing.”
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