School on trial for banning Confederate Flag in dress code

This from H-L:

Tenn. teen battles school's

Confederate flag ban

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. --Tommy DeFoe wore his Southern pride on his Confederate flag belt buckle Wednesday as he argued in federal court that a school dress code banning such items violated his free speech rights.

"I am fighting for my heritage and my rights as a Southerner and an American," said the lanky DeFoe, 18, during a break in the trial that started Monday in his lawsuit against the Anderson County School Board and several county education officials.

DeFoe says his great-great uncle served in the Confederate army and "died for the South" in the Civil War.

But heritage was not the issue for school officials in Anderson County, in East Tennessee not far from Knoxville, who suspended DeFoe more than 40 times for violating the dress code before he received his certificate of completion from the county vocational school last fall.

They feared DeFoe's Confederate flag shirts and belt buckle could inflame racial tensions and violence.

DeFoe's lawsuit is the latest in a string of cases across the South since the 1990s challenging dress codes that banned Confederate flag apparel: a prom gown in Kentucky, purses in Texas, T-shirts in Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.

...DeFoe's lawyer claims the issue is whether the school system can ban the Confederate flag, a symbol of racism to some that has been widely associated with the Ku Klux Klan, if it causes no substantial disruption...

Notes on the graphics:

A photo of the confederate flag hanging from the gallows - as seen by artist John Sims who thinks the Confederate flag is an example of "visual terrorism," and a symbol of a racist past.

Below is a photo of a note given to a black student at George Rogers Clark High School last September. The redacted note shows the Confederate flag being used as a symbol of the south. Also on the note is a sketched lynching and the phrases, "The South will rise again," and "I had a dream white power."