Posted on 08/15/2008 4:24:22 AM PDT by Colonel Kangaroo
CLINTON, Tenn. — Likening the case to the racial discord of the mid- to late 1950s in Anderson County, county school officials on Thursday night said this week's U.S. federal court hearing over a student's right to wear the Confederate flag symbol is being funded "by outside sources."
"Regardless of what you read there's a lot more to it than our enforcement of our dress code," John Burrell, Anderson County Board of Education chairman, said during the county school board's regular monthly meeting.
At the meeting's start, Anderson County school board members spent approximately 20 minutes in an executive session teleconference with their attorney, Arthur S. Knight III of Knoxville. An executive session allows for the elected officials to go behind closed doors and out of the public eye to confer with their attorney.
Knight reportedly was updating the board members on the status of a federal case now under way against the Anderson County school system. The hearing is the result of a free speech lawsuit filed in 2006 by Tom DeFoe, who was then an Anderson County High School student. According to The Associated Press, 18-year-old DeFoe, earned a certificate of completion from the county vocational school last fall.
DeFoe alleges school officials violated his right to free speech, due process and equal protection, when they suspended him more than 40 times for wearing T-shirts and a belt buckle with the Rebel flag emblem.
DeFoe's lawsuit is challenging the county school system's quarter-century old ban on the display of the Confederate flag, as well as Malcolm X or gang-affiliation attire.
This case, Director of Schools V.L. Stonecipher said Thursday night, has made the county's school administrators think about the system's policies.
"There're no winners or losers in this case," Stonecipher explained to board members. "It just shows the importance of board policy and consistency in policy.
"I think our Code of Student Conduct is second to none," the schools' director said.
"You don't realize how things can be scrutinized and what can happen," he added.
"It's being funded by outside sources," Burrell said of the lawsuit.
According to a November 2006 story published in The Oak Ridger, DeFoe's lawsuit was filed by an attorney employed by the Black Mountain, N.C.-based Southern Legal Resource Center Inc.
"In 1956, an outsider, John Kasper, came in and created a problem," Stonecipher said, referring to the racial unrest in Clinton that resulted in the 1958 bombing of Clinton High School. "Then, in 2006, it's an outsider coming in looking for a landmark case."
Kasper was among those who opposed the court-ordered desegregation of Clinton High School in August 1956.
The Associated Press reported Thursday night that a three-man, five-woman jury in Knoxville deliberated a second day Thursday but was unable to return a verdict and will have to return Friday.
At one point, the jury asked U.S. District Judge Tom Varlan for help defining some words key to the case. The judge said they consider his instructions "as a whole" and not word by word.
After more than 10 hours of deliberation, they sent a message to the judge late Thursday. "We cannot reach an unanimous decision. What do we do?"
In addition to asking the jury to resume work Friday, the judge asked the lawyers and their clients to consider the possibility of resolving the case without a jury verdict or accepting a majority verdict instead of an unanimous one.
"I don't see how it is taking so long to figure out that I am right," DeFoe said of the jury, The Associated Press reported. "It is the Confederate battle flag. It is the South's flag. And students should be able to wear it."
DeFoe's lawyers are pointing to related court rulings to argue that past racial violence at Anderson County High School, which DeFoe attended, "does not necessarily prove that the symbolic expression (of the Confederate flag) will cause substantial disruption in the future."
There was no evidence DeFoe's apparel directly led to racial incidents at Anderson County High, where one out of 1,160 students is black, or at the all-white vocational school.
But there was concern that it could raise tensions there and at another county school -- the more racially mixed Clinton High, the first school desegregated by court order in the old South in 1956.
His lawsuit is the latest in a string of cases across the South since the 1990s challenging dress codes that banned Confederate flag apparel. Most have been dismissed by judges or settled out of court.
"Getting to where we have gotten with this case is in and of itself just an incredible victory," said Van Irion, DeFoe's attorney.
"I think when you stand up like Mr. Irion did (in closing arguments) and say, 'The whole world is watching you,' I think the jury really (understood)," said Knight, the school board's attorney. "I sympathize with their plight."
The 2006 lawsuit was filed against Stonecipher, Burrell, the School Board, Anderson County High Principal Greg Deal, Merl Krull and Sid Spiva, both vocational school officials. Spiva has since retired.
Leean Tupper can be contacted at (865) 220-5501. Donna Smith of The Oak Ridger and Duncan Mansfield of The Associated Press contributed to this story.
And given the large number of East Tennesseans who volunteered for the Union army, the people did more than just wait for liberation.
I think the young man's best point is that other possibly controversial clothing is allowed. To be fair across the board, I think all messages on school clothing should be prohibited, not just single out the reb flag.
Once you introduce taxpayer funding into the equation, you open up all sorts of problems. Mandatory dress codes are a great example. (We have them here too, but they’re voluntary. They can’t legally sustain a mandatory code.)
It’s just better for the government to stay out of education, and many other areas of our life. That’s why we home school our kids. We’ve also paid for private school in the past.
That's true, but it seems grotesque to me that a region that was not only non-Confederate, but was so bitterly anti-Confederate that it was long a Republican safe region, should be so soon so ignorant of the past. I guess that's just more evidence of the work of the public schools.
It was a choice between state or federal government being the primary authority. Your opinion of the Confederacy notwithstanding, the war was about economics and power, and who was going to hold more of it.
In my opinion (since we’re throwing opinions around), the war was primarily over the Tenth Amendment, which DC found inconvenient.
I absolutely agree with homeschooling. But there have been dress codes for decades and I agree with them. There are some things that kids should just not wear to school. Racial or obscene t-shirts are an example.
Obviously the people of Anderson County have seen the error of their ancestor’s ways. In reality, the Confederate flag today to many Southern whites represents Southern culture and heritage and freedom from a strong federal government. It means less and less about the Confederate cause in the War for Southern Independence.
Were you alive back then or do you insist on living in the past? Something that happened over a hundred and forty years ago does not make a good case for social constructs.
Do you feel the need to make reparations for slavery, too?
Wear a Che T-shirt and see if a similar ban is made.
http://thechestore.com/
How about a Lenin/Soviet Flag Shirt?
http://t-shirts.cafepress.com/item/lenin-soviet-flag-long-sleeve-tshirt/70334396
Dress codes are fine as long as they're fair and equally enforced. We know that in the real PC world that won't be likely, though.
I guess that's just more evidence of the work of the public schools.
Most public schools teach kids that the Confederates were the bad guys, if not pure evil. They plant reparations ideas in the little kiddies heads from their elementary years with constant dwelling on slaveryslaveryslaveryslavery....More kids probably know who Harriet Tubman was than Madison, Jefferson, FDR, or Eisenhower.
If the public schools were totally succeeding on this issue, no kid in America would want anything to do with a Rebel Flag.
I think you're on to something here. The "southern heritage" that is so often relevant is that of 1950s and the battle against school integration and not the 1860s. It's no accident that the reb flag appeared on Georgia's state flag in the 1950s.
But the Confederate states have not always been against a strong federal government. They were all for federal action in the 1840s to help expand the slave empire into new territories. The southern people were not champions of small government when they overwhelmingly supported FDR, nor did their small government principles lead them to reject federal handouts such as TVA.
Yep. Can't have that free-speaking going on in education.
The problem with deciding it is okay to limit someone's liberty to do or say what they want is that short of banning everything (e.g. uniforms and nothing else), you end up deciding who you will allow to speak and who you won't. Government becomes the controller of all speach. The first amendment doesn't end with "...as long as nobody is offended."
Frankly, how Anderson County voted on secession is irrelevant to this whole discussion, and a bit of local trivia I would expect no one in HS to know.
Which more than anything else shows the abysmal level of knowledge in this country regarding the War of Southern Rebellion.
I can’t say that flag gives me a positive feeling either.
“Free Speech” is currently a one-way ratchet to the left.
I’m sure it would be perfectly OK, or at least a “free speech” issue protected by the threat of lawsuit from the ACLU,
if someone wore a pro-abortion or anti-Christian message on their shirt,
like the footed fish with “Darwin” on it eating the Christian fish symbol.
That little piece of hatefilled garbage puts the LIE to the claim that teaching evolution isn’t intended to destroy religion.
I’m betting that your average ACLU card carrying member
would be perfectly fine with a Che, Stalin, Marx, or Mao T-shirt in school,
but would pitch a hissy over a Christian message or a “Commies aren’t cool” shirt.
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