‘This Could Happen to My Friend’: How the Diallo Shooting Galvanized Harvard Students Against Police Brutality

On Feb. 4, 1999, four New York Police Department officers fired 41 shots at Amadou Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant. More than a year later, the four officers were acquitted of all charges — and Harvard students refused to stay silent.

The verdict sparked a national movement of outrage on college campuses. Student groups at Harvard — like the Harvard Black Men’s Forum, with support from the Harvard Black Students Association and the Harvard African Students Association — sprung into action, organizing protests, town halls, and forum events while encouraging participation from Black and non-Black students alike.

Days after the verdict, the student groups co-organized a silent protest outside the Boston Government Center, encouraging students to wear all black in solidarity.

Harrel E. Conner ’02, the brotherhood chair of the BMF at the time, said that the purpose of the silent protest was to “stand out.”

“One of the things that we did was to start having certain days we wore all black,” Conner said. “The purpose of that was to get attention.”

Shearwood “Woody” McClelland ’00, then-president of the BMF, said that he wanted to increase the “social consciousness of the BMF” through town halls and forum events on racial profiling. In April 2000, with the help of faculty advisor Cornel R. West, the organization invited civil rights activist Reverend Al Sharpton to speak at a Harvard Law School’s Black Law Students Association conference.

The forum initially had relatives of Diallo scheduled to participate, but the family canceled their appearance a week before the event due to unspecified reasons. At the forum, Sharpton urged the students to stand against racial profiling and police brutality.

“We have buried four young men in 14 months who had no weapons but were killed by police. This is absolute insanity,” Sharpton said at the forum, referring to Diallo, Patrick Dorismond, Malcolm Ferguson, and Richard Watson — all of whom were unarmed Black men killed by officers in New York City.

Conner said that their goal for these events was to increase awareness among their peers to create tangible change.

“We also understood that activism is not just about protesting and saying things are bad,” Conner added. “It’s about doing what you can to galvanize change.”

While Conner said the verdict did not cause a “massive amount” of activism, he said it did lead to an “increase in consciousness” for the greater student body.

Students were not the only ones to take action after the verdict. In April 2000, 34 Harvard faculty members released a public statement titled “The Diallo Case is Far From Over.” In their statement, the professors called for sweeping federal oversight, police reform, and deeper reckoning with racial bias in law enforcement.

McClelland expressed approval of the statement, saying that he was glad Harvard faculty members “decided to take a stance on this issue.”

“The overall issue of police brutality and excessive force is bigger than the verdict, which is why I think the statement focused on that,” McClelland said at the time the statement was released. “Even people who supported the verdict should still feel that it is a travesty for an unarmed man to be fired upon 41 times.”

But McClelland still wanted former Harvard President Neil L. Rudenstine to make a statement on the verdict along with former College Dean Harry R. Lewis ’68 and S. Allen Counter.

Rudenstine said in an interview with The Crimson that during his time as president, he tried not to interfere with student and faculty affairs as long as they did not harm the University or the people on its campus.

“My basic view was that students as well as faculty should have a right to say whatever they wanted about current events, and that the University itself, certainly the president, should not be interfering in such things,” Rudenstine said.

“It was important for people to be able to express what they wanted to say, whether it be about this particular event or other events that happened nationally or internationally,” he added.

But Rudenstine said that situations that involve conflict between students call for a different approach, such as in the case of student activism responding to the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel.

“I think that when they begin to insult and potentially harm one another — that’s what calls for another kind of response,” he said. “I think if I had been president, I probably would have felt I needed to say something about the fact that it’s one thing to have a view, it is another thing to insult and harm other people.”

McClelland praised Rudenstine’s response to student activism, saying he felt free to express himself regarding issues such as the Diallo verdict under Rudenstine’s presidency.

“It was an environment where underrepresented minorities felt welcome and felt open to express concerns,” McClelland said.

This rise in consciousness expanded beyond just Black students, motivating non-Black students on campus to take action.

“For the wider community, they began to really understand that they had friends — they may not have been Black themselves — but they had Black friends, and they started to realize, ‘Wait, this could happen to my friend,’” Conner said.

He added later that this realization extended “all the way to very conservative white people” who he said had always argued with him that instances of police brutality only happened “to criminals” with a “shady background.”

“Amadou Diallo was a little bit different in that he was a clean-cut, hard-working guy — no criminal past — and there was nothing that you could pin on him.” Conner said. “He did not have any of the skeletons in the closet.”

This realization that a criminal history was not necessary to be a victim of police brutality served as a wake-up call to students at the time.

McClelland said the incident showed him that “just because you’re at Harvard doesn’t mean you have the luxury of avoiding issues that affect people that aren’t you.”

“That’s something that I was very cognizant of, and still am, even in my current career,” he added.

—Staff writer Chantel A. De Jesus can be reached at chantel.dejesus@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @c_a_dejesus.

—Staff writer Graham W. Lee can be reached at graham.lee@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @grahamwonlee.