The Confederate flag should be illegal and should be eradicated from all flags.

For this argument, I could go either way. Pro, I could say that the Confederate flag is offensive to 13% of America. Which is all the non-whites. They were all tried as slaves, but Africans were the best choice. I am doing this for a school project and I am neutral. If I were con, I would go on and say that it is a historical artifact and should be able to stay on all the flags. The middle school dress code provides: "Generally, student dress is considered appropriate as long as it does not distract others, interfere with the instructional programs, or otherwise cause disruption." The policy also cited some examples of clothing "judged to be inappropriate or distracting in the educational setting," such as "clothing that displays profane language, drugs, tobacco, or alcohol advertisements, sexual innuendoes or anything else deemed to be offensive." The dress code at Candice"s high school states: "Dress is casual, but some styles, which may be appropriate outside of school, are clearly inappropriate for school. Students may not wear the following: . . . Shirts with obscene/derogatory sayings." Latta is a town of about 1400 people. The Latta School District has a student population of approximately 1600 students, almost equally divided between white and African-Americans. The racial history in Latta, including various racial incidents among students, served as justification for the defendants" actions and was important to the court"s decision. "For generations before integration in the 1970-71 school year, whites and African-Americans in Latta had "lived culturally and financially separate [lives]," and integration "made life in [Latta] drastically different." Although school officials have recognized an improvement in race relations since integration, they also stated that "there has always been, and continues to be, an underlying, mostly unspoken, prejudice between [Latta"s] white and black students." " (quoting record testimony). The record further contained evidence of several racial incidents occurring in Latta schools, from the mid-1980R42;s to the most recent in 2009, when a student told another student who was wearing a Confederate flag belt buckle, "If you don"t take that belt off, we"re going to take it off of you." Candice and her parents communicated to the Latta School District (LSD) in attempts to have them change their dress codes. When those efforts failed, they filed a Section 1983 suit in federal district court in South Carolina in 2006 against LSD claiming: "her First Amendment right to free speech and expression was violated because she was not allowed to wear the Confederate flag shirts or protest shirts; her Fourteenth Amendment right to due process was violated because the schools" dress codes are overbroad and vague; and her Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection was violated because the school officials specifically targeted her Confederate flag shirts while not punishing other racially themed shirts." The LSD and Candice"s middle school principal and high school principal were named as defendants. In 2009, the district court granted summary judgment to the defendants, and Candice appealed. In an unpublished opinion, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals remanded the case because the district court decision only addressed the Confederate flag shirts, not the protest shirts that did not bear the Confederate flag. On remand, the district court granted summary judgment to the defendants on all claims, and Candice again appealed. Ruling/Rationale: The Fourth Circuit panel unanimously affirmed the lower court"s decision. It concluded that "the school officials complied with the requirements for regulating student speech as established in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District, 393 U.S. 503 (1969)," and held that the school dress codes and their enforcement did not violate the Due Process Clause or the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The panel began its opinion with an analysis of Candice"s free speech claim to wear the Confederate flag shirts and the protest shirts. Within this claim, Candice also asserted that the Confederate flag shirts were symbols of her heritage and religious faith. The court concluded that each of the shirts was to be considered under the Tinker standard, which established the basic framework governing student speech: That school officials may prohibit or punish student speech that would materially and substantially interfere with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school or collide with the rights of others. School officials may regulate such speech even before it occurs, as long as they can point to facts which might reasonably have led them to forecast such a disruption. This is an outrage. Who cares. It is a shirt. They did not mean anything by it!