Racist Threat Shuts Down Maryland Catholic School For Hate Crime Investigation

A Catholic school in Towson, Maryland closed down Thursday after faculty discovered a racist message written in a bathroom stall. According to an email sent to parents of students at Loyola Blakefield, the message read “No n-----s better come on Thursday.” The email also called it a “suggestive threat,” meaning the Baltimore County Police Department got involved to help ensure student safety.

Loyola Blakefield president Anthony Day said he closed the school “out of an abundance of care for our community,” according to the Baltimore Sun. Day’s statement also emphasized the school’s plan to expel whichever student wrote the message.

“We are heartbroken and outraged by this attack on the respect and dignity of members of our community, especially our African-American members who were targeted by this hateful message,” Day said. “We will discover who did this, and they will no longer be a part of our community.”

Loyola Blakefield is a Catholic prep school that enrolls boys in grades six through 12. Per the same Baltimore Sun report, school officials told police that there have been other “racial incidents” in 2017 that the school did not report to authorities. A November post from the Loyola Blakefield campus life webpage talks about racism in Baltimore area private schools as a long-standing problem that has only recently been acknowledged. For example, there was controversy after students dressed in racist costumes at the private Boys’ Latin School of Maryland for Halloween, according to the Baltimore Sun.

There have been multiple recent reports about racism at catholic schools in other states, such as this report from the Chicago Tribune. According to the report, one all-girls Catholic high school in Kansas City was a hotbed for racist behavior against black students, including an incident in which a group of juniors posted on Snapchat an image of them posing in front of beer pong cups arranged in the shape of a swastika. There was also an incident in Louisiana in August where an eighth grade student commented that a black classmate of his should play a slave in a skit the students would perform on a field trip to an antebellum plantation, reported by the Shreveport Times.

To show support for the school’s black students, some parents changed their Facebook profile photos to a Loyola Blakefield “no hate” logo.