A student who listed his Black classmate on Craigslist as a 'slave for sale' has been given a probationary sentence

• A teen was given probation and ordered to do community service after pleading guilty to hate crimes.
• The student posted a Craigslist ad in 2019 featuring a photo of a Black classmate.

A student in Illinois has been given a probationary sentence for posting an ad on Craigslist offering one of his Black classmates as a "slave for sale."

The unnamed male student at Naperville Central High School in the western Chicago suburb of Naperville, Illinois, was given a two-year probationary sentence and was ordered to serve 100 hours of community service, per a statement released by the DuPage County state attorney's office.

According to the statement, the student pleaded guilty to two counts of felony hate crime and one count of disorderly conduct on September 1. He will be required to undergo counseling as part of his probation.

The incident occurred in November 2019, when the student took a photograph of a Black student at the school. The student then uploaded his schoolmate's photo to Craigslist and captioned it "Slave for sale (Naperville)," along with a racial slur, per the DuPage County press release.

Neither student was named in the press release, but reports from 2019 described the student as a 14-year-old white freshman at Naperville Central who snapped the picture of his classmate when they were seated at the same table at lunch.

The Chicago news station WGN-TV interviewed the Black student's mother in 2019. She told the news outlet the two boys "used to be friends" until the other student started teasing her son, making fun of his skin color, and saying things like "shut up, slave."

"Hate crimes have no place in a civilized society and will not be tolerated, regardless of the accused's age," DuPage County State Attorney Robert Berlin said in the press statement.