The Michigan Daily has perpetrated a trend of negative coverage about The Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action By Any Means Necessary since September 2001. This egregious policy has ranged in substance from outright untruth, to half-truth and innuendo; in form, it has ranged from phony "expose pieces," to "news pieces" to signed regular columns, to signed viewpoints, to prominently featured letters, to unsigned official editorial proclamations.

No other political group in memory has been subjected to this kind of political treatment from the Daily. Yet judged by any objective standards, BAMN's real accomplishments and contributions have been greater than those of any other political organization at the University. Furthermore, while preferring not to give credit to BAMN, the Daily itself has actually supported the overwhelming majority of BAMN's positions and most of its actual initiatives.

At the heart of the Daily's ill-conceived, malicious policy toward BAMN and the new civil rights movement is the inability of the Daily to identify with or to express the experience of black and other minority students at the University.

The main criticism of The Michigan Daily against BAMN is the claim that our supposedly "divisive rhetoric" and our radicalism have harmed the defense of affirmative action by driving away moderate supporters of affirmative action. The Daily has not even felt obliged to come up with an example of this "divisive rhetoric."

That BAMN has fought side by side with the University administration in the courtroom and mobilized many thousands of University students and students around the country in rallies and marches since the lawsuits were filed in the fall of 1997 are facts sufficient of themselves to disprove the Daily editors' central contention.

Ironically, despite the recent trend of negative coverage by the Daily editors, many of our efforts over the years have been editorially endorsed by the Daily. From our original effort to secure student intervenors' status in the University of Michigan Law School case along with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union in the undergraduate case, to the boycott of the Michigan Union in protest of discriminatory policy toward black and Latino social events to the recent editorial opposing the use of the SAT in college admissions.

We have organized in coalition with many of the establishment civil rights leaders and the organizations they represent; we have received support from several elected officials including Congressional Reps. John Conyers and Carrie Meeks and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown and from numerous labor organizations.

On the day before the 6th Circuit Court in Cincinnati heard the appeals of the two University cases, the Congressional Black Caucus, Latino Caucus and Progressive Caucus all signed on to our petition which we presented to the court with over 50,000 signatures on it. At the recent national conference of the new civil rights movement that BAMN organized, the National Director of the NAACP Youth and College Division addressed the conference and talked of his organization's commitment to its ongoing coalition with BAMN.

The unfounded criticism that our "divisive rhetoric" has alienated moderate supporters crashes headlong into these facts, which are themselves only the tip of the iceberg of the support which we have organized and coalesced into a growing struggle to defend affirmative action. In reality, it is The Michigan Daily's divisive rhetoric and the rhetoric of BAMN's other demagogic opponents that has represented an attempt largely in vain to divide the new civil rights movement, by attempting to divide the supporters of affirmative action from their most dedicated and effective leadership.

In his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail," Martin Luther King talked about the opposition to the movement of people "who prefer a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly say, 'I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can't agree with your methods of direct action.'" Over the past year, the Daily editors have been such people.

As for BAMN's "radicalism," it consists precisely with this: BAMN insists that the defense of affirmative action is not just a question of academic diversity. It is a crucial part of the historic American struggle for equality and justice for all. We think the Daily editors may actually agree. The Daily should set aside its nebulous, irrational fears, and find the courage to say so.

Aleobua and Royal are members of BAMN and are the MSA executive slate candidates for the Defend Affirmative Action Party.