Prominent Harvard University professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after an incident with police responding to a call about someone apparently trying to break into his Cambridge, Mass., home.
Gates, who according to his lawyer, had been trying to force open a jammed door, was inside the house when the Cambridge police officer got there.
He allegedly responded to the officer's request for identification by shouting, "Why, because I am a black man in America?" and calling him a racist.
Though Gates eventually identified himself, he was arrested after he allegedly came out of the house and continued yelling at police, even after he was warned that he "was becoming disorderly," according to the police report.
Gates, 58, is scheduled to be arraigned Aug. 26.
Gates, the director of Harvard's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, and former host of the PBS show "African American Lives," had just returned from a trip to China and found the front door of his home jammed, according to his Harvard colleague and attorney Charles Ogletree.
He entered the house through the back door, but then tried to get the front door open so he could bring his luggage in, which may have been when the woman who called 911 saw, Ogletree said.
Gates has declined to discuss the incident, but Al Sharpton, who spoke to the Harvard professor, told ABC News that Gates is "clearly upset and in a state of disbelief."
via ABCnews
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