White Kid Wears KKK Costume To School As An Assignment… With Teacher’s Approval

Share

Explore Our Galleries

An NAACP flyer campaigning for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, which passed the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, but was filibustered to defeat in the Senate. Dyer, the NAACP, and freedom fighters around the country, like Flossie Baily, struggled for years to get the Dyer and other anti-lynching bills passed, to no avail. Today there is still no U.S. law specifically against lynching. In 2005, eighty of the 100 U.S. Senators voted for a resolution to apologize to victims' families and the country for their failure to outlaw lynching. Courtesy of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Some Exhibits to Come – One Hundred Years of Jim Crow
Mammy Statue JC Museum Ferris
Bibliography – One Hundred Years Of Jim Crow
Claude, age 23, just months before his 1930 murder. Courtesy of Faith Deeter.
Freedom’s Heroes During Jim Crow: Flossie Bailey and the Deeters
Souvenir Portrait of the Lynching of Abram Smith and Thomas Shipp, August 7, 1930, by studio photographer Lawrence Beitler. Courtesy of the Indiana Hisorical Society.
An Iconic Lynching in the North
Lynching Quilt
Claxton Dekle – Prosperous Farmer, Husband & Father of Two
Ancient manuscripts about mathematics and astronomy from Timbuktu, Mali
Some Exhibits to Come – African Peoples Before Captivity
Shackles for Adults & Children from the Henrietta Marie
Some Exhibits to Come – The Middle Passage
Slaveship Stowage Plan
What I Saw Aboard a Slave Ship in 1829
Arno Michaels
Life After Hate: A Former White Power Leader Redeems Himself

Breaking News!

Today's news and culture by Black and other reporters in the Black and mainstream media.

Ways to Support ABHM?

By Montana Couser, TheRoot.com

A student tweeted this photo of a classmate who wore a Ku Klux Klan costume for a class project. Screenshot: CNN

For most kids, when they get the option to choose a historical figure for a history project, they choose people like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, or Barack Obama.

This freshman in high school decided to choose former KKK leader Hiram Wesley Evans as his “historical figure.”

With his teacher’s approval, the unidentified student was able to wear the infamous white hooded outfit to school. The student body of Harbor Teacher Preparation Academy in Wilmington, Calif., is 96% minority and it came as a surprise to many of the students when they saw the boy outside of his history class.

“It kind of rattled me. It was hard to believe that [the teacher – who was also unidentified] would allow a Klansman to walk around from her approval. So, we asked her, and she … compared the Klan to the Black Panther Party, which in my opinion are two different things,” rising senior Trinity Young said…

Evans in Washington, D.C., on August 8, 1925

A district spokeswoman from The Los Angeles Unified School District said that the incident is being investigated and also called the costume “insensitive and highly inappropriate.”

Read full article here.

More Breaking News here.

Read more about the KKK and history of racism here

 

Comments Are Welcome

Note: We moderate submissions in order to create a space for meaningful dialogue, a space where museum visitors – adults and youth –– can exchange informed, thoughtful, and relevant comments that add value to our exhibits.

Racial slurs, personal attacks, obscenity, profanity, and SHOUTING do not meet the above standard. Such comments are posted in the exhibit Hateful Speech. Commercial promotions, impersonations, and incoherent comments likewise fail to meet our goals, so will not be posted. Submissions longer than 120 words will be shortened.

See our full Comments Policy here.

Leave a Comment