Sororities and fraternities in the south have unfortunately had a few incidents with embarrassing, racist remarks lately. In the latest of these, a sorority at Samford University in Alabama produced t-shirts depicting a black man eating watermelon.
The Alpha Delta Pi sorority’s Kappa chapter at the university apparently printed the shirts for their spring formal. To make the shirts worse, there were slaves picking cotton in the background, overlaid on a state map of Alabama.
“I was repulsed by the image,” Samford University President Andy Westmoreland wrote in an email, according to CBS News. “I lack the words to express my own sense of frustration.”
According to Forbes, Samford is 81 percent white and only 7 percent black. In addition, pictures that the sorority has posted seem to show that the sisterhood is pretty much all white, as well.
So much fun at @samfordgreeks Open House! We can’t wait for recruitment! #KeepingUpWithADPiKappa pic.twitter.com/NMKXGP2jSn
— ADPiSamford (@ADPiSamford) September 2, 2015
“This is completely inconsistent with the university’s missions and values,” communications official Philip Poole said, according to TIME. “We will be following our procedures as quickly as possible to address this violation of Samford’s values community.” Although Samford has yet to discipline the sorority, many university officials have hinted at an investigation and future punishments.
According to New York Daily News, Samford University has claimed it denied the sisters of ADPi’s request to make the shirts for their spring formal.
They clearly made them anyway.
“The shirt design absolutely contradicts the values of respect and dignity that our organization prides itself on. We do not tolerate, and would never intentionally approve any design with racial stereotypes/overtones or any other offensive images or language,” the chapter wrote in a statement through Alpha Delta Pi’s national website.
CBS reported that the t-shirt’s map was found on Google by an ADPi member. Allegedly, none of the sisters noticed the design? “This situation highlights for all our chapters the importance of attention to detail,” the sorority’s statement concluded.
Since then, the images of the racist and inappropriate shirts have spread like wildfire—and people are pretty upset. Apparently, evoking images of cotton fields and the slave trade is not the best way to “celebrate” Alabama’s history.
If the university said no to the shirts and the women at ADPi printed them anyway, it’s hard to find their excuse of not noticing the design believable. Hopefully, the investigations, by both the university and the national Alpha Delta Pi organization, help to make sense of these details.