University of Manchester Students Replace Rudyard Kipling Mural With Maya Angelou Poem

University of Manchester students have defaced a mural featuring Rudyard Kipling's "If," a poem deemed not in line with their values, after it was painted on a wall of a newly renovated union building without their consult, reports BBC News. In fact, "student leaders erased the work, replacing it with a piece by Maya Angelou in a bid to reverse 'black and brown voices' being written out of history." More:

Sara Khan, liberation and access officer at the union, wrote on Facebook that Kipling's "racist" work supported the role of the British Empire and Angelou's poem was chosen as a "reclamation of history by those who have been oppressed by the likes of Kipling for so many centuries".

Kipling was born in India in 1865 and worked as a journalist while he wrote many of his early works, which included The Jungle Book, published in 1894.

In 1907, he became the first English-language writer to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Prof Montefiore added: "Certainly his politics were imperialist but that's only half of the story.

"He wrote some wonderful stuff and was a magical storyteller but he wasn't always writing uplifting poems."

Prof Montefiore said Kipling wrote The White Man's Burden in 1899, urging America to administer imperial practices in the Philippines and its sentiment was "completely unacceptable now and fairly unacceptable then".

A spokesman for the students' union said: "We understand that we made a mistake in our approach to a recent piece of artwork by failing to garner student opinion at the start of a new project."

The full story at BBC News.