"Honk If You Have Aloha!" read some of the signs held aloft by some 200 participants in an after-school rally that fringed Salt Lake Boulevard. Passing motorists obliged.

Lorell Brewton carried one of those signs, but on the flip side it read: "I'm Half-Black and I Love Local Boyz."

"I have to turn it around sometimes," the teen said with a grin.

The placards were peppered with ethnic references because of allegations that racial strife lay at the heart of the weekend fights, allegations perhaps fanned by media depictions of the campus as a kind of war zone after administrators ordered a lockdown Monday.

Where did the charge of racism originate?

Most of the roadside cheering section said it popped up in the days after the fight.

The initial brawl, they said, boiled down to a basic disagreement between two students that, Fukuda said, "got out of hand."

"Pretty much, it was a group of people not liking another group of people," said senior Carol Bayudan, student body president. "No school is perfect but, from my perspective, I think Radford is a good school."

Some racial epithets were hurled on campus in the furor of the coming days, people acknowledged, because of the chatter following the initial episode.

When racism first surfaced, nobody could say for sure. Cheerleading coach Bo Frank thought it was just the rumor mill churning. Others said it was a distressed parent who was the first to level the charge and tipped off the media.

Student newspaper photographer Christina Brown, an 11th-grader and a junior member of the media corps, put down her camera long enough to say that she could see the big picture.

"It was a fight, and people were in the hospital, so I can understand," Brown said.

But the bottom line, the students said, is that people now have the wrong idea about their school, one they longed to correct. One held a sign that read "I Became An Honor Student at Radford."

Algebra teacher Troy Freitas strummed a guitar and sang a Bob Marley classic: "One love, one heart, let's get together and feel all right." If it sounded like a hippie fest, well, Freitas felt it was high time.

Monique Brooks, who is black, said the depiction of Radford as a racist environment is not the school she knows, although her parents were uneasy enough about the purported tension to keep her at home for four days.

Joe Brundidge said he's been enjoying his second year in Hawai'i and at Radford, and compared it to the school he last attended with fellow black military dependents.

"I came here from a small town in Oklahoma," he said. "Just the diversity of Hawai'i. ... I was used to there being just black and white.

"On my first day, I went down the hall and I heard three different languages!" he exclaimed. "I mean, before I came here, the only Samoa I knew was the name of a Girl Scout cookie!

"That's what I love about Hawai'i. For this to happen, it's totally opposite of what Radford is about."