Opinion ID: 179427
Heading Depth: 1
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Analysis under Tinker of the School District's Ban on Displays of the Confederate Flag

Text: The district court granted summary judgment in favor of Defendants based on this Court's decision in Barr v. Lafon, 538 F.3d 554 (6th Cir.2008). In Barr, racial tensions at Blount County High School in Blount County, Tennessee prompted the principal to announce that displays of the Confederate flag were prohibited. Two students who subsequently wore t-shirts to school displaying the Confederate flag sued after being told to remove or cover-up the t-shirts or face suspension. The students alleged that the ban violated their free speech rights. This Court upheld the district court's grant of summary judgment in favor of the school board on the basis that school officials reasonably forecast that displays of the Confederate flag would disrupt school work and discipline, and thus adhered to the Tinker standard. In reaching this conclusion, the Court pointed to evidence in the record regarding racial violence, threats, and tension. Specifically, the Court pointed to the following evidence: (1) a fight between an a black student and a white student; (2) a complaint filed with the Office of Civil Rights alleging that the school punished a black student more harshly than a white student following a racially-motivated altercation; (3) racist graffiti that included racial slurs and generalized threats against the lives of blacks; (4) hit lists of specific student names; (5) unspecified race-related fights; (6) a fear of racial violence that resulted in absenteeism among black students; and (7) a school lockdown implemented because of the deterioration of student discipline and the threat of race-related violence. 538 F.3d at 566-67. The Court concluded that these occurrences established that school officials reasonably forecast that displays of the Confederate flag would likely disrupt the school environment. Id. at 567. Plaintiffs argue that the Confederate flag itself has not caused any disruption in the past at ACHS or ACCTC that would justify the ban. However, as this Court stated in Barr, such an argument misapplies the Tinker standard because  Tinker does not require disruption to have actually occurred. 538 F.3d at 565 (quoting Lowery v. Euverard, 497 F.3d 584, 591, 593 (6th Cir.2007)) (internal quotation marks omitted). Instead, the Court evaluates the circumstances to determine whether the school's forecast of substantial disruption was reasonable. Id. Under Tinker, to justify prohibition of a particular expression of opinion, a school district must be able to show only that its action was caused by something more than a mere desire to avoid the discomfort and unpleasantness that always accompany an unpopular viewpoint, but rather, that the school authorities had reason to anticipate that the wearing of [the banned imagery] would substantially interfere with the work of the school or would impinge upon the rights of other students, including the right to be secure and to be let alone. Brogdon v. Lafon, 217 Fed.Appx. 518, 525 (6th Cir.2007) (citations omitted). Plaintiffs also argue that the district court erred in granting summary judgment by erroneously conclud[ing] that `ACHS and ACCTC have recently experienced intense racial conflict' and that such a conclusion could not have been made without the court improperly weighing evidence and failing to grant all reasonable inferences in Plaintiffs' favor. (Appellant's Br. 19.) More specifically, Plaintiffs argue that the evidence demonstrates that racial tension is low at both ACHS and ACCTC. We disagree. The record contains uncontested evidence of racial violence, threats, and tensions at both ACHS and ACCTC. At ACHS, several incidents have occurred: two days after two black male students enrolled at ACHS, a large Confederate flag appeared draped in a school hallway; racial slurs such as dirty niggers, sand niggers and dirty mexicans were directed at Hispanic students; racially-charged graffiti including a Swastika and the words niggers and white power, and the comments White 4 Life and I Hate Niggas, J/K AVM; graffiti including the name of a racially mixed couple along with something about nigger-lover, white girl, black boy, in my school and a picture of a hangman's noose; a black Clinton High School student involved in a leadership program at ACHS being called a nigger by a group of white ACHS students; Oreo cookies thrown onto the basketball court when a biracial Clinton High School basketball player attempted to warm-up before a basketball game; and a physical altercation between a Hispanic student and a white male student stemming from the white student's reference to the Hispanic student's brother as a sand nigger, dirty mexican. There is also uncontested evidence pertaining to incidents and the racial climate at ACCTC: a complaint from a black student's parent after the student was called a nigger on the school bus; a black student changing classes and transferring to Clinton High School based on his fear of a white student; incidents that occurred on ACCTC school buses stemming from racial epithets such as nigger and white students singing racial songs; a physical altercation resulting from a racial joke; a biracial female student being subjected to racist name-calling such that she wanted to call home; and difficulty recruiting minorities to ACCTC because potential minority recruits do not want to attend ACCTC due to racial tensions. In addition, there is evidence of racial violence, threats, and tension at Clinton High School such as: racial graffiti including KKK references, and comments such as I hate niggers, Kill all the niggers, and I hate this nigger-hating school. I'm going to blow it up; the discovery of a noose in a student's locker along with stickers like White Power, KKK, and other racially-charged statements; and various unspecified race-related physical altercations. Although some of the incidents of racial violence, threats, and tension present in Barr are not present here, uncontested evidence in this case clearly indicates racial violence, threats, and tension in Anderson County schools. Indeed, unlike in Tinker, Plaintiffs' free speech rights colli[de] with the rights of other students to be secure and to be let alone, Tinker, 393 U.S. at 508, 89 S.Ct. 733, and this is not a situation where the prohibited speech was entirely divorced from actually or potentially disruptive conduct by those participating in it. Id. at 505, 89 S.Ct. 733. In Tinker, the speech at issue communicated negative feelings about the Vietnam War whereas the speech at issue in this case communicates a message of hatred toward members of the student body population and, therefore, this case presents a situation involv[ing] substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others ... [which is] not immunized by the constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech. Id. at 513, 89 S.Ct. 733. Even without evidence that Confederate flag displays had been the direct cause of past disruptions, school officials reasonably could surmise that such displays posed a substantial risk of provoking problems in the incendiary atmosphere then existing. Brogdon, 217 Fed.Appx. at 523. Accordingly, even if a student's display of the Confederate flag has not actually disrupted the learning environment, the district court nonetheless could conclude that displays of the confederate flag would be likely to lead to unrest in the future. Such a determination is not erroneous as either a factual finding or a legal conclusion. Id. at 524. Indeed, Tinker does not require that displays of the Confederate flag in fact cause substantial disruption or interference, but rather that school officials reasonably forecasted that such displays could cause substantial disruption or materially interfere with the learning environment. Tinker, 393 U.S. at 514, 89 S.Ct. 733. Our holding today that school officials in this case reasonably forecast that permitting displays of the Confederate flag would substantially disrupt or materially interfere with the school environment accords with precedent not only from our own circuit, but from our sister circuits as well. See A.M. ex rel. McAllum v. Cash, 585 F.3d 214, 223 (5th Cir.2009) (concluding that the racially inflammatory meaning associated with the Confederate flag and the evidence of racial tension at [the high school] establish[ed] that [school officials] reasonably forecast that [displays of the Confederate flag] might cause substantial disruption of school activities); B.W.A. v. Farmington R-7 Sch. Dist., 554 F.3d 734, 741 (2009) (upholding a school district's ban on clothing depicting the Confederate flag based on evidence of likely racially-motivated violence, racial tension, and other altercations directly related to adverse race relations in the community and the school); West v. Derby Unified Sch. Dist. No. 260, 206 F.3d 1358, 1366-67 (10th Cir.), cert. denied, 531 U.S. 825, 121 S.Ct. 71, 148 L.Ed.2d 35 (2000) (upholding a school district's clothing ban based on past racial incidents and a history of racial tension in the school district); Melton v. Young, 465 F.2d 1332, (6th Cir.1972), cert. denied, 411 U.S. 951, 93 S.Ct. 1926, 36 L.Ed.2d 414 (1973) (upholding a school's code of conduct based on continued racial tension and physical altercations tied to displays of the Confederate flag). [6] Because the evidence establishes that the Tinker standard is met, we conclude that school officials reasonably forecast that permitting displays of the Confederate flag would result in substantial disruption of, or material interference with, the school environment. Such a conclusion is compelled by the racial violence, tension, and threats occurring in Anderson County schools as well as the fact that the Confederate flag is a controversial racial and political symbol. Castorina v. Madison Cnty. Sch. Bd., 246 F.3d 536, 542 (6th Cir.2001); see Brogdon, 217 Fed.Appx. at 524 (noting the Castorina court's implicit acknowledgment that the Confederate flag is a controversial and political symbol).