Four posters covered in swastikas and Ku Klux Klan imagery turned up scattered across a bench, a chair, the coatroom, and the floor of UNC-Chapel Hill's Ackland Art Museum in late September, prompting staff to call university police — who ultimately determined no crime had occurred.
The posters, discovered by Ackland staff, depicted Jesus burning on a cross, Donald Trump holding a clown nose, a dollar-sign branding iron, and a silhouette of a Klan member, according to The News & Observer. Text on the posters included phrases like “An appeal from heaven,” “Hey Jesus, we got something for ya,” and “Hey Jesus, turn that other cheek round.” A second poster appeared to list categories such as tech bros, sports bros, gamer bros, gym bros, and Warner Bros., per the same report. UNC police consulted with Ackland security staff and a student worker before concluding the posters did not represent a physical threat and did not amount to vandalism.
Police determined the posters did not amount to vandalism in this incident. North Carolina has an ethnic intimidation statute, N.C.G.S. § 14-401.14. Because UNC is a public university bound by North Carolina's 2017 Restore Free Speech Act, campus administrators are statutorily barred from restricting or punishing expression based on content alone unless it crosses into criminal threats, true harassment, or physical vandalism.
Student Body President Sees an Intent Gap
UNC student body president Devin Duncan told the News & Observer he believes the posters were intended as artistic expression rather than a deliberate attempt to send a threatening or hateful message. Still, Duncan said, the posters' impact on the community is real regardless of the creator's intent, describing a gap between what the artist may have meant and how community members actually felt encountering the imagery.
After police determined that no crime had occurred, the matter was referred instead to UNC's Equal Opportunity and Compliance Office, the university's non-criminal mechanism for handling bias complaints. The office evaluates reports under the university's Policy on Prohibited Discrimination, Harassment and Related Misconduct using a preponderance-of-the-evidence standard, and it can offer non-punitive interim measures such as no-contact orders or housing and work accommodations, according to UNC policy documents. The compliance office can still assess whether an incident creates a hostile environment under civil rights policy and respond accordingly.
Ackland Museum director Shalini Le Gall sent an email to staff and other stakeholders this week stating that such material will not be tolerated at the museum or in the workplace, the News & Observer reported. The university itself said the situation did not rise to the level of a criminal act but acknowledged the offensive material does not reflect the community experience UNC wants to foster, adding that engagement with the compliance office remains the most useful next step. The university is encouraging anyone with information about the posters to contact that office.
A Museum With Its Own Complicated History
The Ackland Art Museum, which holds a permanent collection of more than 21,000 works and opened in September 1958 through a bequest by Tennessee native William Hayes Ackland, carries its own fraught backstory. Its endowment traces in part to family wealth connected to Isaac Franklin, co-founder of what is described as the largest domestic slave-trading firm in U.S. history, according to Wikipedia. The museum also houses Ackland's own marble tomb and sarcophagus inside Gallery 3, per a directive written into his 1936 will.
Part of a Tense Fall Semester
The poster discovery lands amid a string of racial episodes that have rattled UNC's campus this fall. Those incidents reportedly included an intruder who threatened Black students at an event, an antisemitic poster hung in the law school, and Taiwanese students being targeted with monkey-like gestures by white men, according to the News & Observer's reporting. The Daily Tar Heel first reported the poster story.
One of those episodes was the Aug. 31 intrusion into Greenlaw Hall, where an unaffiliated man disrupted a Black Student Movement watch party, shouted racial slurs, threw objects, and sprayed a substance before university police arrested him — an incident previously covered by Hoodline. The Black Student Movement, founded in November 1967, remains one of the largest student groups on campus and has a decades-long history of advocacy around campus climate. Two days earlier, on Aug. 29, members of the UNC Taiwanese Student Association were targeted with anti-Asian harassment while gathered on Polk Place, according to Chapelboro.com.
Those incidents drew attention well beyond campus. U.S. Rep. Valerie Foushee sent an open letter to UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts on Sept. 18 requesting immediate answers on campus safety protocols and outreach to students of color following the late-August harassment incidents. The episodes have intensified ongoing friction between artistic expression, free speech protections, and efforts to safeguard campus climate.
