No Whistlin’ Dixie: Court Upholds School Ban on Confederate Flags

[WSJ_law_blog]

In 2005, Steven Lafon, the principal of the William Blount High School in Maryville, Tennessee, told an assembly of the freshman class that students “would not be allowed to have Rebel flags or symbols of [the] Rebel flag” on their clothes. That policy displeased students Derek Barr, Chris White and Roger Craig White. They wanted to express their southern heritage by wearing clothing depicting the Confederate flag. So they sued.

Today, in the face of the plaintiffs’ free speech claims, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a grant of summary judgment in favor of the school. Here’s the opinion.

Explaining the rationale for the ban, the court cites the testimony of a Tennessee school director who said that racial tensions at the school comprised the context for the clothing ban. “Relevant incidents,” writes the court, “included racist graffiti that made general threats against the lives of African-Americans, graffiti containing ‘hit lists’ of specific students? names, physical altercations between African-American and white students, and a police lockdown at the school.” Of the approximately 1,750 students attending William Blount, less than ten percent are African-American.

In its opinion, the Sixth Circuit distinguished this case from Tinker v. Des Moines Ind. Comm School, the landmark First Amendment case that struck down a school ban on armbands to protest the Vietnam War.

In Tinker there were no facts in the record that would ‘reasonably have led school authorities to forecast substantial disruption of or material interference with school activities, and no disturbances or disorders on the school premises in fact occurred’ as a result of students wearing black armbands in protest of the Vietnam War. The facts in this case, however, even when viewed in a light most favorable to Plaintiffs-Appellants, indicate that school officials could reasonably forecast that permitting students to wear clothing depicting the Confederate flag would cause disruptions to the school environment.