The issue over anti-Black Lives Matter cartoons in the student newspaper at Wesley College took an unfortunate turn as, rather than let students discuss it among themselves, the college president became involved. President Robert E. Clark II addressed the student body in a college wide e-mail. A forum was also held.

The cartoons were published in The Whetstone, an independent student newspaper, by Black student Bryheim Muse. One cartoon featured a young black woman in a Black Lives Matter t-shirt, who notes "would you look at the time... I'm late for my abortion." Another is of a black man telling a garden hoe that she looks like a hoe.

"I was trying to make a point, showing the hypocrisy behind the Black Lives Matter--in one way we're saying 'Black Lives Matter', but in another way, we're aborting our children and we're saying it's OK," said Bryheim Muse, the cartoonist, who's a senior at Wesley. "The small amount of number of blacks dying from cops compared to the large amount of blacks dying from abortion--these are real issues that our people need to address," said Muse. "My main point of all of this was to show Black Lives Matter is not the solution to our problems, protesting, begging other people to fix our problems, the solution to our problems is keeping God's commandments," he said. "Black-on-black crime, if we kept the law on 'love thy neighbor as thyself,' we wouldn't have that."

Muse addressed the cartoons, according to WDEL:About Monday's forum, Muse noted that students weren't interested in an explanation. "The students weren't really trying to get why I made the cartoons, they just wanted to basically tell me why they hated it. They didn't show up for solutions, they showed up to argue, basically," he mentioned.

Senior Tiffany Griffin has been speaking out actively against the cartoons on social media through #WCStandUp. "A lot of students were kind of frustrated about the way the administration handled, I guess, the forum, and the cartoon as well, because we thought that there was really no consequence for the cartoon," she claimed.

Griffin and other students issued a list of demands, which attempted to control the content the independent newspaper publishes. Other demands addressed hiring more black staff and racial sensitivity training.



President Clark gave into at least one of those demands with his e-mail. He began by noting the cartoons were "in no way reflective of the beliefs or values of our College." Clark was also "disappointed by the depiction" and "apologize[d] to everyone in our family, as well as anyone else who viewed and was offended by the depiction."

Despite Muse's claims about how he was received, President Clark noted that Muse and editor, Kristen Griffith, who is also black, "were afforded the opportunity to explain their reasoning for the depiction and decision to publish the cartoon. They received feedback from a cross section of our Wesley College family present last night about how the depiction could be interpreted by a large portion of our society as hurtful and demeaning," he continued.

President Clark has gotten involved in criticizing the student paper before and trying to control their content, according to Griffith.