Calif. high school students walk out over racist post probed as hate crime

At student admitted posting the message, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. The message, shared on Twitter by the school's black student union and then published by local news outlets, included racial slurs, a claim of past racial violence, a reference to the Ku Klux Klan, and threatened a "public lynching" in December.

The student, whose name was not released, acknowledged creating the post in a statement to school officials, said Mark Coplan, a spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District, according to the Chronicle.

There was no immediate word on what disciplinary action the school would pursue. 

Police investigated the message as a hate crime, White said.School officials found the message at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday.

On Thursday morning, the students assembled outside the high school and marched a few blocks to the campus of University of California Berkeley, chanting and carrying signs.

Among the chants was "Black Lives Matter," a refrain that has come to define a national movement against systemic racism and police violence that spawned last year in the wake of numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed black men.

White said there were no reports of arrests or injuries and that the protest was peaceful. He said police were monitoring the event and blocking off streets to allow students to march.

The black student union called the message "terrorism" in a statement and demanded immediate action.

"The safety of Black students has been explicitly threatened," the statement said.

"They are really afraid because they have been threatened by this message,” said Coplan, according to the Los Angeles Times. "They are calling on everyone to come up with solutions to end this kind of madness.”

Berkeley High senior Navya Laki, 17, said the black student union went class to class to spread word of the protest. She said a previous racial incident on campus had not been taken seriously by staff, and said: "With this one, it's like we were fed up. We are going to do something about it."

District officials told the Chronicle that the message on the computer appeared to be a screen shot of the school's library home page, which had been modified to include the racist language.

Officials told the newspaper they did not believe someone hacked into the school's system, nor did they think the web site had been altered.

The hate message is the third reported incident since last year in the district, school officials said, according to media reports.

In fall 2014, a noose was found hanging at the Berkeley High campus, and last spring, a digital yearbook file was hacked. The section describing student's futures was changed to "future trash collection," Coplan said, the Times reported, adding district officials belive students of color were the targets of the hack.

Al Jazeera and Reuters