Two Diversity Murals Defaced With Nazi Symbols At University of Iowa
Courtesy of University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections Department
Two murals at the University of Iowa celebrating diversity were graffitied with Nazi symbols, local station WQAD reported Wednesday.
The first incident was reported last week and the second on Sunday, according to police.
These are not the first incidences of Nazi or far-right activity on campus. White supremacist fliers were distributed in an Iowa City neighborhood in January. And last year, another diversity mural was defaced with a swastika, while a card promoting the alt-right was found in the school library.
The president of the University of Iowa NAACP, Santos Rodriguez, criticized the school for not doing enough to combat racism on campus.
“They want these images of people of color doing well on our campus, and, you know, we even get recruited to come to the campus,” Rodrigues said. “But it seems that it’s just all a marketing aspect because when we are actually on campus it’s a lot of instances where we are having to face down blatant racism.”
Contact Avichai Scher at scher@forward.com or on Twitter, @avi_scher
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
