A Virginia history professor is taking legal action against one of his former students after he says several acts of racism were committed against him.
Speaking to Wavy news, Joel Mungo said he has never seen anything like it during his twenty-one years as a history teacher at Menchville High School.
“Someone left a banana at my door. The banana was perfectly placed in the doorway,” Mungo told Nexstar’s WAVY as he shared images of a banana left in front of his door.
Mungo told the local outlet that the perpetrator started dropping the bananas in October last year, explaining that the person would drop one banana per month.
Mungo said the bananas were always dropped in the same spot at his classroom’s doorway. Mungo decided to take legal action after the banana was dropped for the sixth time. “It was clearly a deliberate act,” he said.
After Mungo reported the racist act to Menchville administrators, school officials pulled up a surveillance video, which captured the student believed to be responsible for dropping the bananas. The student happened to be a 10th-grader in one of Mungo’s classes.
“I gave the student a chance to come clean. I asked him, ‘Hey did you do this?’ He said ‘No,’ he played dumb, ‘No idea what you’re talking about.’ So I said ‘OK, go down to the assistant principal.’ I’m the only Black teacher he has. He has six other teachers. No other teachers were involved,” Mungo said.
According to Mungo, the student was placed on a two-way suspension and was removed from the classroom after his parents were contacted.
“Initially when the parents were contacted, the parents seemed to be truly embarrassed. Then when the student was suspended and the parents were informed, then the parents were irate. It’s 2022. Just to have some type of hate crime is absolutely ridiculous. I was sickened. I was highly upset. So upset, I took the next day off. I didn’t go to work that Friday,” Mungo recalled.
Mungo is now taking legal action against the racist act.
“I’m just fed up with the racism around, especially at our academic institutions. Coming from the HBCUs and other colleges, the bomb threats, the nooses, the bananas and now it’s streaming into public education. It’s time to take a stand and just let people know it will not be tolerated. I know I’m not tolerating it. You have to speak up. You can’t allow it to go on because then it will just continue to go on,” Mungo said.
Officials have met with Mungo about the racist act, which is under investigation.
