âTori Anderson, a third-year Law School student, shows her support by adding a sticky note to the portrait of a black Law School professor on Thursday afternoon after black tape was found covering the photos in the morning. Anderson said, âThis [the post-its] shows the outpouring of support for the faculty. I wish we had a greater and more robust response from the administration and a greater focus on creating, not only community inclusion, but institutional inclusion.ââ Jennifer Y. Yao, The Harvard Crimson
âBlack tape, stuck systematically across the portraits of black law professors, spurred on Thursday a police investigation into vandalism and a pronouncement from the dean of Harvard Law School that the school has a âserious problemâ with racism.
Law School students and teachers who walked into Harvardâs Wasserstein Hall on Thursday morning found pieces of black tape covering some of the faculty portraits that hang on walls inside the buildingâspecifically on the faces of black professors depicted there.
The incident prompted outrage from Law School students who were quick to condemn it as racist vandalism, and police are now investigating.
Harvard University Police Department spokesperson Steven G. Catalano said Thursday evening that the investigation is âactive and ongoing,â and although he declined to comment further, Law School Dean Martha L. Minow wrote in a statement that police are investigating the incident as a hate crimeâŚ.â
âŚLeland S. Shelton, the president of the Harvard Black Law Student Association, described it as âactually one of the most clear-cut, overt instances of very, very vile and disrespectful behavior from somebodyâ; second-year Law School student Michele D. Hall, who posted photographs of the vandalized portraits in a post on the website Blavity, wrote, âThis morning at Harvard Law School we woke up to a hate crime.â
After the tape was removed from the portraits, students posted notes with words of support for the black professors alongside their photographs.
âŚThe incident and subsequent hate crime allegations follows incidents at Yale and the University of Missouri at Columbia that have prompted protests against racism at colleges across the country, including a march and rally at Harvard on Wednesday.
It also comes as a group of Harvard Law School students who call themselves Royall Must Fall has requested the removal of the schoolâs seal because it features the crest of a family that owned slaves.
That group of students denounced the vandalism as âan overt act of racial hatredâ in an open letter published in the Harvard Law Record, a student publication. They also claimed in their letter that the Thursday incident could be a reaction to their activism: They had placed several pieces of black tape over several depictions of the schoolâs seal around campus on Wednesday night, they wrote, alleging that someone had removed those pieces of tape and then placed them on the portraits of black faculty membersâŚ.â Andrew M. Duehren with Claire E. Parker, The Harvard Crimson
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