An Oklahoma mom said her 8-year-old son was punished for wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt to school.
Ben Stapleton, a third grader at Charles Evans Elementary School in Ardmore, was told by the principal during gym class to turn his Black Lives Matter shirt inside-out on April 30.
“It made me mad and sad,” he told KXII. “They pulled me out of P.E. and told me to put my shirt inside out and then I started playing.”
Ben’s mother, Jordan Herbert, said she contacted the school on Monday and was told by the superintendent that her son would not have been punished if he’d refused to flip the shirt inside-out. However, she suggested administrators took advantage of the fact that Ben was young to coerce him.
An 8-year-old Black elementary student in Oklahoma was punished for wearing a Black Lives Matter shirt to school, his mother says.
Ben Stapleton wore the BLM shirt last week at Charles Evans Elementary School in Ardmore and was instructed by the principal to turn the shirt inside out during P.E. class, according to local outlet KXII. But when Stapleton wore the shirt again, the child was allegedly taken out of class and forced to sit in the principal’s office for hours in what his mother described as modern-day segregation.
“They pulled me out of P.E. and told me to put my shirt inside out and then I started playing,” the child said.