Manchester University students paint over Rudyard Kipling mural

Students say poet is ‘well-known racist’ and replace poem If with Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise

Students at the University of Manchester have painted over a mural of a poem by Rudyard Kipling, arguing that the writer “dehumanised people of colour”.

The poem If, written around 1895, had been painted on the wall of the university’s newly refurbished students’ union. But students painted over the verses, replacing them with the 1978 poem Still I Rise by the American poet and civil rights activist Maya Angelou.

Related: Ode to whiteness: British poetry scene fails diversity test

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