Tension heightens, bringing arguments and suspensions after a Confederate flag is raised over Hudson High School.
By REBECCA CATALANELLO and STEVE THOMPSON
Published February 6, 2004
HUDSON - Every school day Hudson High students arrive to find Old Glory flying over the campus.
On Wednesday, though, there was something else.
"My stomach just dropped," 17-year-old Melissa Foster said Thursday."I got the instant sick feeling of who would do this and why?"
Flying over the school was a Confederate flag with the words "I ain't coming down" printed across it. It fluttered over the campus from the darkened morning hours until the first half-hour classes, its halyard cut so that it couldn't be lowered.
Some students, offended by the symbol they equate with racism, spent the morning trying to find out who was responsible.
Emotions escalated. Rumors spread.
By lunch, an assistant principal had to step between an angry 15-year-old black girl and an argumentative white boy who principal Greg Wright said used profanity and racial slurs in answer to her questions of who had raised the flag.
The boy was suspended.
The girl was arrested - she's accused of storming away from the conversation and ramming her shoulder into a school employee. She's facing a battery charge as a result.
"We can't allow this kind of thing," Wright recalled telling students as he went on closed-circuit television between lunch periods.
He knew he had to bring things under control. He called on students to tell the administration everything they knew about what had happened.
Before the end of the day, four white students had been suspended for the flag-raising - two sophomores, one freshman and a Hudson Middle School eighth-grader. School officials are seeking expulsion, at least against the high schoolers, for obstruction of school property and disrupting the school environment.
One of the four, a 16-year-old boy, also was arrested and charged with criminal mischief. Sheriff's deputies said he'd raised the flag the night before and cut the flagpole rope.
By Thursday, Confederate flags were banned from the school's dress code.
"Acts of racism and prejudice are counterproductive to any society and will not be tolerated at school," Wright wrote in a letter he sent to parents.
A year of tension
Wednesday marked a climax to what some students and officials said has been a school year of escalating racial tensions.
In a September surprise, a black student was suspended after administrators said he circulated a self-authored letter that contained violent threats against blacks. And the week before Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Hudson High officials were investigating claims of repeated racial slurs against some in the school's minority population.
"You feel like you're unwelcome in a school," said 15-year-old Fredrick Quijano, one of a handful of black students at Hudson High. "When I go to school, I treat white people the way I treat anyone else."
Of the 1,592 students enrolled at Hudson, minorities account for less than 7 percent and blacks only number 16, according to district figures.
Wright said the minority population is growing and the school, which has struggled with race relations in the past, must embrace the change.
But Rebecca Doolen, a white 14-year-old, and her mother, Toni Lemieux, remained defiant.
Doolen said she and her friends agreed to wear their Confederate garb on Thursday in reaction to the incident. And, Doolen said, she'll do it again today, despite warnings from administrators that she could be sent home for it.
"It's heritage, not hate," Doolen said. "If they don't like it, they'll have to get over it."
Superintendent John Long said the district takes an unassuming approach to the dress code as it concerns Confederate flags. As long as it doesn't seem to be disrupting the school environment, they are allowed.
Things have gone overboard at Hudson, though.
"We're not casting any dispersions on anyone's heritage," Long said. "But I don't recall, at least in my years here, the Confederate flag reaching this kind of fever pitch before."
Lemieux, who runs The Big Redneck Shop in Hudson, applauded the flag raising as "kind of cool" and said she regretted not having taken a photo of it so that she could have sent it to the National Alliance - a group the Southern Poverty Law Center identifies as a hate group.
Within 30 minutes of stepping off a plane from Philadelphia on Thursday evening, St. Petersburg NAACP president Darryl Rouson got two phone calls about the incident.
He called on parents, administrators and other adults to "really drive home sensitivity, cultural tolerance, social understanding" in the community, pointing out that these behaviors are learned.
Soon after leaving school Thursday, 18-year-old Richard Ward summed up the incident as "just a few students who did an ignorant thing."
"Wow, the confederate flag," he said. "Wow, they put it up there. Whoop-de-do."
Ward is one of only a handful of black seniors at the school.
"Every year more and more minorities are coming to our high school, but some people don't want to change," he said. "They're going to have to."
