Black Harvard Law professors’ portraits defaced

Police are investigating a case of vandalism involving portraits of black Harvard Law School professors that were defaced with black tape, an incident that prompted Law School Dean Martha L. Minow to call racism “a very serious problem” at the school on Thursday.

Students at Harvard Law School discovered on Thursday that black tape had been placed over the pictures of many African-American professors outside a lecture hall. In photos posted online by one student, it appears that the vandal specifically targeted the portraits of black people, rather than every portrait of a person of color.

Besides sharing the broader concerns raised by students at other colleges, Harvard Law students have a few specific demands.

Michelle Deakin, a law school spokeswoman, said that an investigation was ongoing, but that the school had no comment at this time.

Law School students, faculty, staff, and administrators gathered for a “community meeting” at noon on Thursday to discuss the incident. To Hall, that action constituted a hate crime. “Their faces were slashed through, X-ing them out, marking them as maybe unwanted or maybe unworthy or maybe simply too antithetical to the legacy of white supremacy on which Harvard Law School has been built”.

Third-year law student Jonathan Wall tweeted out the image of the defaced portraits.

“I was shocked, and I was obviously disgusted. Especially because it seems to be in response to yesterday’s day of activism”, Wall told The Boston Globe .

The black tape on the portraits at Harvard Law was later removed and replaced by notes with positive statements about each of the professors. Harvard students marched Wednesday in solidarity with students at Yale and the University of Missouri who have been protesting racial injustice.