A Duke University student has admitted to hanging a noose from a tree on campus, a day after hundreds attended a rally there decrying racism at the university.
University police and the office of student affairs said on Thursday that they had identified the student but would not release a name due to federal privacy laws. The student is “no longer on campus”, a police spokesman, Keith Lawrence, said, adding that the person “will be subject to Duke’s student conduct process”.
“Duke continues to coordinate with state and federal officials about potential criminal violations,” Lawrence said. The school is looking for others who may have been involved.
On Wednesday, hundreds of students marched through campus to attend a rally organized by the Black Student Alliance and a later a forum presided over by the university president, Richard Brodhead.
Standing before the Gothic chapel near the center of campus, Brodhead told more than a thousand students that tying a noose was an “abhorrent” action and vowed that he and the school “repudiate” such behavior. “That’s not the Duke I know,” he told students.
He hailed the crowd as a visible rejection of what the noose symbolizes in North Carolina, where lynching has a stark and particularly painful resonance. By one count, at least 86 black people were lynched in the state between 1882 and 1968.
“One person put up that noose, but this is the multitude of people who got together to say that’s not the Duke we want,” he told the crowd. “That’s not the Duke we’re here for, and that’s not the Duke we’re here to create.”
Brodhead and the university provost, Sally Kornbluth, also sent an email to students on Wednesday condemning “cowardly acts of hatred” that have rattled the school in recent weeks, including not only the noose but a racist chant reportedly sung to taunt a black student two weeks ago.
Members of the Black Student Alliance posted signs around campus declaring “We are not afraid. We stand together,” and students chanted “black lives matter” at the rally, linking the noose to the burgeoning civil rights movement around the country sparked by police killings of black people such as Michael Brown, Eric Garner and Tamir Rice.
The student group’s vice-president, Henry Washington, praised the reaction of fellow students and administrators at the school.
“I appreciate that immediate action was taken both by the student community to identify a person and by the faculty to ensure that disciplinary action is taken,” he said.
Online reaction to the student’s confession soon included murmurs of disapproval that the university would not name the person, a policy reiterated by a Duke spokesman, Michael Schoenfeld, during an afternoon press conference.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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