“I don’t care if it’s Martin Luther King Day,” yelled a 19-year-old New Jersey woman into her camera phone. “I’m in the South now.”
Harley Barber finished the rant by repeatingly chanting a particularly harsh racial slur as another girl laughed off-screen.
Barber posted the video to her "fake" Instagram account on Monday, but by Wednesday she was packing her bags and moving back home from the University of Alabama.
First, Barber’s sorority, Alpha Phi, kicked out the college freshman. Shortly after, the University of Alabama expelled her. Now, police sit outside her parents’ Marlton home after the family received death threats when the footage went viral.
“I did something really, really bad,” Barber told the New York Post. “I don't know what to do and I feel horrible. I'm wrong and there's just no excuse for what I did ... I feel so, so bad and I am so sorry.”
For its part, the University of Alabama said on Twitter that Barber’s “unfortunate behavior” is “ignorant and disturbing and in no way reflects [its] values.”
“I’ve personally experienced discrimination like that in my school,” Marlton resident Leah Chinn told NBC10. “Her organization did the right thing by kicking her out.”
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No one answered when NBC10 knocked on Barber’s door. But at a nearby salon, employees said they were appalled by her words and a recent Facebook post left by a longtime customer.
In the post, a woman commented that “All black should go back to Africa,” salon owner Martino Cartier told NBC10. He didn’t waste time responding in kind. Cartier sent the customer a letter saying her patronage was no longer welcome at his business.
“MLK was a great man,” he said. “How dare you? You are part of why this society is the way it is. I will not tolerate it.”
