A college at Cambridge University has dropped plans to host a ball with a contemporary southern United States theme in the wake of accusations of racism.
Mamusu Kallon, who was born in Sierra Leone and is a student at St Edmund's, initially claimed to the Independent that St Edmund's College had planned to theme its annual summer ball around Gone With the Wind, the 1939 Oscar-winning film staring Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable which has been widely criticised for its depiction of black people.
"It is a film that glamorises the romantic dreams of a slave owner and a KKK member while rendering the horrors of slavery invisible," she said.
"The black characters fulfil every derogatory racist stereotype of the 'slave' and black people continue to be subject to the modern-day versions of these stereotypes."
However, the chairman of the ball committee has told the Guardian that a closed committee meeting only briefly considered Gone with the Wind along with other literary works before unanimously rejecting a literary title. The committee voted instead for "The Beautiful South" as it was considering the band of the same name playing at the ball. Kallon was not a member of the ball committee.
"The Beautiful South" theme for the summer ball was later dropped and the theme will now be "Journey Through the Seasons".
Students at Cambridge and Oxford University recently launched a photo campaign to highlight their experiences of racial discrimination at the university.
Students at Oxford said they wanted to "demonstrate that despite there being a greater number of students of colour studying at Oxford now than there has ever been before, there are still issues that need to be discussed."
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You can follow the hearing at 10am online.
• This article was amended on 22 September 2014 to clarify that "Gone With the Wind" was never chosen as the theme for St Edmund's College's May ball.
