Dec 16, 2014 12:36 PM EST By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A collective of three anonymous artists claimed responsibility for three cardboard cutouts on the University of California - Berkeley (UCB) depicting lynchings of black men and women.

According to the Guardian, the collective posted a statement to a campus bulletin board Sunday, the day after the effigies were noticed on campus with no indication of who put them there or why. The group said their demonstration was to illustrate the presence of racism in America.

"We are sorry - your pain is ours, our families', our history's," they said in their statement. "For those who think these images no longer relevant to the social framework in which black Americans exist everyday - we respectfully disagree."

A student found the bulletin board message and showed it to Pablo Gonzalez, a guest research fellow at UCB who then posted a picture of the message to his Twitter account, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.

"These images connect past events to present ones - referencing endemic [fault lines] of hatred and persecution that are and should be deeply unsettling to the American consciousness," the statement reads. "We choose to remain anonymous because this is not about us as artists, but about the growing movement to address these pervasive wrongs."

UCB said in a statement Sunday that police removed two of the effigies while students took down the third. Virtually absent of any context whatsoever, Chancellor Nicholas B. Dirks and Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Claude Steele jointly called the imagery "deeply disturbing." Since the group claimed the demonstration, UCB has not commented further.

The group also confirmed that their demonstration was meant to be connected to the recent Grand Jury decisions not to indict police officers for the killings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner.

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