The disorderly conduct charge against Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. was dropped today by a Cambridge, Massachusetts prosecutor. A joint statement was released by the city of Cambridge and city police saying that they recommended to the District Attorney the charge be dropped.
As previously reported, , Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested Thursday trying to get into his locked Massachusetts home. According to his lawyer ,Charles Ogletree, Gates returned from China to find his front door jammed and forced it open with the help of his driver. He was inside several minutes before an officer showed up and asked him to step outside. A woman had alerted police that a man was trying to pry open the front door of a nearby house. According to police, he then called an officer a racist and said, “This is what happens to Black men in America.”
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.
