The person who plastered racial graffiti across Michigan’s Albion College during midterm week, fueling protests, was a Black student, according to officials.
“Earlier today, we identified the individual responsible for the racist and anti-Semitic graffiti in Mitchell Towers,” college President Mathew Johnson said in a Thursday email to students obtained by the school’s Albion Pleiad. “The student, who was acting alone, acknowledged their responsibility for these incidents, and was immediately removed from campus and placed on temporary suspension while we conduct a full investigation as part of our student judicial process.”
The 21-year-old Black male suspect was questioned by police on April 6, according to Police Chief Scott Kipp, and later released. Prosecutors will decide whether to file charges after the investigation is complete.
Students and some faculty members had boycotted classes this week after the graffiti was left around campus. The messages contained racial epithets and references to the Ku Klux Klan, including one that said, “Call the swat #KKKTime.” School officials said earlier in the week that the FBI was assisting with their investigation.
The incident led to days of protesting by students, who walked around campus with signs expressing their disapproval of racism and chanting messages that included “silence is violence.”
“I’m tired of having to do these things,” protest organizer Jayson Sawyer told WWMT’s Trisha McCauley. “I wish I could get up like a regular kid, go to class, come home and do homework, but that’s not my reality.”
A Friday op-ed authored by the Albion Pleiad’s editor in chief, Jordan Revenaugh, suggested that discovering the perpetrator’s identity might not change anything from students’ perspective. “The fact that it was a student of color who was behind the malice on campus doesn’t change the fact that we have a problem,” Revenaugh wrote. Isn’t the fact that we so blindly believed the perpetrator to be white an issue in and of itself? This isn’t a problem because it’s ‘unfair to white people’ or any of the claims like that that I’ve seen surface [on] the internet. The reason we believed it is simply because it’s believable – that’s the problem.”
Revenaugh said the incident was a call for “white people … to do better so that people have no reason to make that assumption of us.”
Officials said no determination had been made about whether the perpetrator would be allowed to remain enrolled at the school.
*story by MEDIAite
