About 20–30 of the #itooamSU signs placed in the grass between Newhouse III and the Schine Student Center were stolen Thursday night, according to the Syracuse University chapter of the NAACP.

After learning that the signs were stolen, members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People executive board decided to remove the remaining signs to prevent them from also being stolen, said Kadisha Phillips, the press and publicity chair for SU NAACP. The executive board is still deciding whether to report the incident to the Department of Public Safety, Phillips added.

“We had this campaign because people feel like they’re guests rather than students,” she said. “The fact that someone thought it was OK to rip them up means they don’t respect our views as students.”

The signs, which had phrases written on them such as “Brown skin, orange blood” along with the hashtag #itooamSU, have been in the grass since Sept. 18, Phillips said.

Phillips first learned about the signs being stolen this morning when a friend told her about an incident on the South Campus bus early Friday morning at about 1:30 a.m. According to Phillips’ friend, two white men not associated with the NAACP walked onto a South Campus bus carrying the #itooamSU signs. Another man then went up and talked to the two men and told them it was disrespectful to take the signs out of the ground and took the signs from them, Phillips said.

Phillips said she does not know the man who took the signs from the two men but she would like to figure out the identity of this man and what he did with the signs.

Over the last few days, Phillips said she had noticed that there were fewer signs on the grass, but hearing about the incident on Thursday night confirmed for her that signs were being stolen.

This is also not the first time signs placed between Newhouse and Schine were vandalized. In honor of the International Trans* Day of Remembrance, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Resource Center set up a weeklong display of signs in the same location that read “Trans* Lives Matter” last November. However on Nov. 11, 2013, the signs sponsored by the center were stolen, bent, tossed and spit on. Trans* includes those who identify as transgender, transsexual, gender nonconforming, gender queer and gender fluid.

The theft of the #itooamSU signs was particularly disappointing because members of the SU NAACP executive board paid for them out of pocket since the organization doesn’t have a lot of money, Phillips said. The total cost of printing, laminating and buying the wooden sticks for the signs was about $200, and it took about six hours to put all 95 signs together, she said.

“(The stolen signs) really speaks to the fact that there isn’t a good environment on this campus where people are open to talk about the way that they feel,” she said.

Published on October 3, 2014 at 7:26 pm

Contact Jessica: jliannet@syr.edu | @JessicaIannetta