Prominent Harvard Professor and black scholar, Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested Thursday trying to get into his locked Massachusetts home. A woman alerted police that a man was trying to pry open the front door of a nearby house. According to The Associated Press, when police arrived they asked him to identify himself but Dr. Gates refused. He then called an officer a racist and said, “This is what happens to Black men in America.”
Police declined to comment Monday. He is the director of Harvard’s W.E.B. Dubois Institute for African and American Research and Editor-in-Chief of TheRoot.com, an online African American magazine.
