A London vigil on Monday drew tens of thousands of people to mourn the late academic and author Jason Arday, The Guardian reports, with some speakers criticizing the media’s coverage of his life and death.

The group Stand Up to Racism, which organized the event, said some 30,000 people attended.

Arday, whose memoir, Great and Unfortunate Things, was published in the U.S. last week by 37Ink/Simon & Schuster, was found dead in his London home on Aug. 14. He was 41. A spokesperson for London’s Metropolitan Police said that Arday’s death was “unexpected, but is not believed to be suspicious.”

Arday’s shocking death came days after he resigned his professorship at the University of Cambridge in the wake of accusations that he had plagiarized parts of his doctoral thesis. Arday denied those claims, though he acknowledged there were errors in his work.

His death has sparked widespread debate, on both sides of the Atlantic, about how the media handled the story. At the rally, Diane Abbott, a member of Parliament, noted that there were nearly 250 articles about Arday over the span of three weeks. “He must have felt that if he resigned, the attacks on him would stop,” Abbott said. “But in fact, they got even worse. This is a vicious campaign.”

Many critics and commentators have echoed the charges of racism. At The Emancipator, historian and author Ibram X. Kendi wrote, “The White-owned, mainstream media circulates their attacks. And piles on and on and on and on.…The media will bury its culpability while we bury Jason.”

In an editorial, The Guardian, which was among the publications to extensively cover the plagiarism claims, wrote, “It was right for the Guardian to publish its investigation, and it is wrong that the journalists who did their job responsibly are now being subjected to an onslaught of abuse.”

The editorial continued, “Arday became an exhibit in an ideological, almost Trumpian campaign against diversity and inclusion. The allegations were no longer simply about one academic’s behaviour or his past record. They were used to suggest that Arday had never deserved to be there—and that he had only been advanced because of his race.…This is racism at work. White academics are generally allowed to fail as individuals. Black ones are not. Arday may have had questions to answer; that did not make black academics collectively answerable for him.”

Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.