A sorority at Samford University near Birmingham, Ala. (not Stanford University in California, to be clear), is in hot water for producing T-shirts that have a black man eating a watermelon plopped under people picking cotton, reports the New York Daily News.
Alpha Delta Pi was advertising its spring formal and featured a “vintage-style map” of Alabama on the shirts. Said map had several details from the state, including a black man eating a huge slice of watermelon and a gaggle of dark folks picking cotton on its right side.
The sorority said that it found the map on Google and didn’t notice the details, but the college says that it denied the organization’s request to make the shirts, but the group made them anyway.
“In selecting the T-shirt, we failed to focus on the specific images in the design,” the sorority’s Samford chapter president, Lauren Hammond, said, according to the Daily News. She said that the shirts will be destroyed.
After it all hit the fan, the university, sorority chapter and international organization predictably apologized post-haste.
University President Andrew Westmoreland said he was “repulsed” by the shirt and called it “abhorrent.”
Read more at the New York Daily News.