Florida A&M University (FAMU) is what is referred to as a "historically black college and university," or HBCU, and, like several other HBCU's has a celebrated marching band which performs at half-time of the school's football games and on other occasions. FAMU's band, referred to as "The Marching 100" (it actually has over 300 members), is probably the most famous of these bands, as reflected in the fact that it was invited to France in 1989 to represent America in the festivities marking the centennial of the French Revolution. The Marching 100 is the model for many other such bands, and one of the things that they modeled was a culture of violent hazing. As reported in a 2010 piece by journalist Frank Deford in Sports Illustrated, "new band members -- called ‘crabs' -- had to face choreographed assaults, with two-by-fours, belts, baseball bats, beer bottles, suffering literally hundreds of blows from their older compatriots.... The victims also admitted, grievously, that they succumbed to a horrible psychological turnabout, because as painfully injured as they'd been when they were beaten, they themselves willingly became the twisted assailants the next year." Usually, hazing does not result in serious injury or death, but predictably it sometimes does.

At first glance, the Champion hazing tragedy seems a little atypical, as he was an older student in his mid-twenties (he had earlier dropped out of school for financial reasons) and thus was not a new band member. However, there is an initiation rite aspect to the story, in that Champion had applied to ride on Bus C, the percussion vehicle that held the highest status among band members. As part of the process for being accepted on Bus C, a student had to run the gauntlet from the front to the rear of the bus, being beaten along the way by the occupants. This apparently is what happened to Champion, during which he suffered internal bleeding that caused him to collapse and go into fatal shock. Less than a month before Robert Champion was killed, a female freshman FAMU band member named Bria Hunter suffered a broken femur and blood clots after being beaten by three band members. Such extreme cases are not a new thing at FAMU, however. For example, in 2001, a FAMU band member named Marcus Parker suffered severe kidney damage after being beaten hundreds of times with a paddle.

As a result of the Champion and Hunter beatings, the Marching 100 has been suspended and there are serious calls for it to be disbanded. The state of Georgia (where Champion and Hunter were from) has suspended marching bands at over 20 high schools, because of fear that a culture of violent hazing was developing within those organizations. Renewed attention is being paid nationally to the problem of violent hazing in college marching bands, a problem that seems to be localized mainly in HBCU's, the vast majority of which are located in Southern states. Scholars, most of them African-American, have made efforts to understand why this culture of violent hazing arose and persists. One interesting theory espoused by Walter M. Kimbrough, president of Philander Smith College in Arkansas, is that it is an offshoot of a 1990 collective decision by college presidents to end pledging (which always involved hazing) at HBCU fraternities. Because opportunities for hazing in HBCU's suddenly became limited, they resurfaced in marching bands, which have many of the features of fraternities but which to some extent are freer from supervision and discipline by adults such as leaders of national organizations (which will suspend or terminate fraternity chapters where abusive hazing is tolerated).

In terms of my four-factor theory of foolish behavior, the most powerful explanation for what happened to Robert Champion is "Situation". Two situational aspects, in particular, seem especially relevant: (a) the fact that members-including the victims-enter into the group knowing that hazing will occur and accepting it as a legitimate price to pay, and (b) the fact that the practice occurs in secret, free from scrutiny by the outside world of adults except, of course, when something goes seriously wrong. There is a process of groupthink occurring here, in which an otherwise deviant act (assaulting someone with fists or objects) is defined by the collectivity as non-deviant and even valued. In such a case, individual conscience and judgment tends to fly out the window, and members of the group allow the behavior of others to guide their own actions. It takes a certain degree of courage to withstand such pressure, and few people possess that courage, especially given that the likely price of taking a stand is ostracism or expulsion.

Here it is necessary to make a somewhat sensitive point having to do with the partial complicity which victims of hazing play in their own victimization. It is difficult to imagine that anyone who joined the FAMU marching band was unaware that they would be hazed, both because such hazing was well-known on campus, but also because many of the members came from high school marching bands which emulated the practices of the famous HBCU bands. Certainly, Robert Champion must have known beforehand that he would have to run the gauntlet of Bus C before being allowed to ride on that high-status vehicle. He did not seem to feel oppressed by such practices (according to his parents, he was very happy with the band experience) or to consider saying "no, do not assault me, unless you are prepared to spend a year or more in jail." The willingness of most members to be assaulted (although, obviously, not to end up near death) made it, of course, much easier to carry out these heinous practices. Thus, a major engine that drove the whole sick process was the strong motivation of members to participate in the band, a topic covered more fully under "Affect/ State" below.