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Thursday, March 28, 2024 | Back issues
Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service

Court Won’t Reconsider Confederate Flag Case

(CN) - The full 6th Circuit refused to reconsider its August 2008 decision to uphold a Tennessee county dress code barring high-school students from wearing clothing that depicts the Confederate flag.

The three-judge panel rejected a lawsuit brought by students and parents in Blount County, who said the county dress code violates their right to express their Southern heritage by donning apparel bearing the controversial flag.

The court declined to rehear the case without comment, but Chief Justice Boggs dissented.

"Absent evidence that certain expression 'would substantially interfere with the work of the school or impinge upon the rights of other students,' school authorities cannot prohibit it," Boggs wrote.

The dress code for county schools prohibits students from wearing anything that could disrupt other students from learning, including clothing that promotes drugs or alcohol, sexually suggestive or vulgar apparel, and attire that depicts racial or ethnic slurs or gang affiliation.

Principal Steve Lafron informed the freshman class of 2005 that "they would not be allowed to have Rebel flags or symbols of (the) Rebel flag on their clothing, or anything else that was a disruption to the school."

He testified that clothing bearing the racially divisive symbols had caused a disruption the previous year.

Judge Moore of the Cincinnati-based federal appeals court said Lafron and other school officials had valid reasons for the ban, given the school's history of racial tension.

Moore said the dress code, "as applied to ban the Confederate flag, is constitutional because of the disruptive potential of the flag in a school where racial tension is high and serious racially motivated incidents, such as physical altercations or threats of violence, have occurred."

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