NAACP requests Confederate flag ban in classrooms

Northern Orange County NAACP President Patricia Clayton called for Orange County Schools to ban the use of Confederate flags in classrooms in a letter to the school board.

Chapel Hill and Orange County have experienced controversy over the Confederate flag in the past. And similar bans have been requested in states like Indiana, Arizona and Oregon.

Kristen Marion, a UNC NAACP political action coordinator, is a mentor for the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Youth Council. She said she wants a similar ban for Chapel Hill- Carrboro City Schools.

“I can definitely say the racial tensions are very high for (students she works with), and they definitely make them feel very uncomfortable,” she said. “We see this as a great opportunity to make things a little easier for our kids.”

Marion said she does not condone the use of the Confederate flag on university campuses, and even less, in high schools or middle schools still learning about segregation and race.

“The same way when we talk about Nazis, and referring to the Holocaust, is the same way we should be talking about the Confederate flag and where it came from,” she said.

Confederate flag-related demonstrations have taken place on campus in the past. And in the fall of 2015, students counter-protested the Alamance County Taking Back Alamance County protest by Silent Sam.

“The (U.S.) Supreme Court has been pretty clear for 40 years now that school administrations can restrict the speech of high school and middle school students,” said W. Fitzhugh Brundage, chairperson of the UNC History Department. “But college student free speech seems to me a different matter.”

Brundage said it can be difficult for people to separate symbols from their meanings.

“Whether or not the Confederate flag has become a symbol of hate, it is a fact that it is a symbol of hate in the eyes of a very large number of people,” he said. “It would be extremely disturbing and disruptive to a learning environment if a student wore swastikas to school and made it clear the student embraced neo-nazi ideology.”

Brundage said the flag can also take on meanings and memories of certain events.

“I think after Dylann Roof’s massacre in Charleston, anyone who wants to display the Confederate battle flag now is doing so in full recognition that someone who massacred (nine) people was explicitly embracing that symbol,” Brundage said.

Tucker King, a UNC senior archaeology major, said he believes there should be a ban on the Confederate flag on personal items but that students should still be taught about the Confederacy.

“You need to represent it. It was a bad thing — we need to take it as what it was,” he said. “We can’t forget it. Silent Sam? Take it down. Tear it down. Leave it in the textbooks though. We can’t forget. We need to talk about it. It’s a relevant issue.”

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