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In December 2020, an African American mother desperate for her son, a high school senior, to graduate and go off to college was forced into court to defend him. The young man, so close to achieving his mom’s dream, suddenly found his life turned upside down and his future threatened.
William Clark, a senior at Democracy Prep in Las Vegas, Nevada, has a Black mother and a deceased white father. He is, according to his court filing, generally regarded as a white person by his classmates because of his lighter skin, blonde hair and green eyes.
Last fall, Clark’s school began using “critical race theory” curriculum in its mandatory Sociology of Change class. The teacher and lawsuit defendant, Kathryn Bass, “required Clark and his fellow students to reveal and make professions about their gender, sex, religious and racial identities, and subjected those professions to public interrogation, scrutiny and derogatory labeling …”
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Many more across the nation were renamed or taken down following the May 25 police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Minneapolis.
In the seven months following the Floyd killing, more symbols were removed from public property than in the past four years combined.
According to a count from the Southern Poverty Law Center, 168 Confederate symbols came down in 2020, but 704 monuments are still standing. SPLC Chief of Staff Lecia Brooks says some states made it more difficult to remove monuments following a watershed event in South Carolina.
“The flag came down in Charleston in 2015, so the southern states feared their states would be targeted next and implemented these preservation laws soon after that, Brooks told WKU Public Radio.