Students protest after racist anti-Obama grafiti is scrawled on university's 'free-speech' wall

Protesters at a North Carolina university are calling for changes to a part of campus dedicated to anything-goes speech after someone painted racist graffiti directed at President Barack Obama.

North Carolina State students blocked access oveight to the Free Expression Tunnel, a major pedestrian thoroughfare that connects two parts of the Raleigh campus divided by railroad tracks.

University spokesman Keith Nichols says the students had stopped their blockade by late Thursday moing, although some protesters remained.

Chancellor Randy Woodson talked with the protesters at the tunnel earlier in the moing, and plans to meet with students later in the day.

He has condemned the graffiti, which has been painted over.

It is not the first time the tunnel has been daubed with anti-Obama grafitti.

The he was elected president in 2008, two of the messages said: 'Let's shoot that (N-word) in the head' and 'Hang Obama by a noose'.

Officials with the state chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People called for the students to be expelled, but officials said they had no grounds to do that.

UNC President Erskine Bowles appointed the UNC Study Commission to Review Student Codes of Conduct as They Relate to Hate Crimes.

'This is an important conversation for us to have, (but) it is unfortunate that we have to do so as a result of the situation at N.C. State,' said Harold Martin, UNC senior vice president for academic affairs, at the time.