Teens Suspended After Protesting School Dress Code in Confederate Flag Clothing

What the Confederate flag stands for and where it can be displayed has prompted a group of high school students to stage a protest. (Photo: WSLS)

The Confederate flag has come under more fire than usual lately, with detractors calling it a symbol of racism and supporters insisting it’s an emblem of Southern heritage and pride.

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Now the fight over the flag has come to a Virginia high school, and it has prompted about two dozen students to deck themselves out in the stars and bars to make a point about free speech — and then end up with in-school suspensions.

Students at Christiansburg High School, in the southwestern part of the state, protested on Thursday against a schoolwide ban on clothes and cars emblazoned with the Confederate flag. The ban violates their First Amendment rights, they contend.

“We’re not doing this to cause trouble,” Zach Comer, a junior sporting a Confederate T-shirt and belt buckle, told the Roanoke Times on Thursday. “We’re doing this to raise awareness.”

A smaller pro-flag demonstration occurred Friday morning, with eight to 10 pickup trucks displaying the flag and driving down the street in front of the school briefly. These protesters were not students, Brenda Drake, public information officer of Montgomery County Public Schools, tells Yahoo Parenting.

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The high school first banned Confederate flag images on clothing after the 2001-2002 school year, when racially motivated fights occurred on campus and the flag was used in some incidents as a symbol of racial hatred, says Drake.

“Since then we’ve had other instances of racially motivated fighting, and the presence of the flag on campus has prompted complaints from some students,” she says.

These incidents and complaints underscore the need to bar the flag, she adds, and they prompted a new ban on Confederate flag images on cars in the student parking lot, which went into effect at the start of the school year.

Prohibiting the flag at Christiansburg High School comes on the heels of other recent flag bans, most notably at the South Carolina Statehouse in July. The ban was instituted after 21-year-old Dylann Roof murdered nine worshipers at an African-American church in Charleston. Roof, a white supremacist, had posed for photos before his rampage with the flag draped behind him.

It remains to be seen if demonstrations will continue next week at the high school. At least one student protester told the Roanoke Times that he is considering filing a lawsuit against the school district. But prohibiting clothes and cars with the Confederate flag may not be a violation of students’ rights.

“This is a complicated issue. It requires balancing student rights of free speech with a school’s responsibility to be free of harassment and intimidation,” Rebecca Glenberg, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia, tells Yahoo Parenting.

“A number of courts have addressed Confederate flag T-shirts, and the courts resolved the issue by looking at the circumstance. If the school makes the case that the shirt will cause a disruption at school, the courts say they can be banned,” says Glenberg,

If there’s no evidence of this, however, courts typically have said that a school can’t ban the shirt. “Schools need to be very careful when regulating student speech so they are not regulating a specific viewpoint, and a speech policy should apply across the board,” she says.

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