SLRC in the News
12 September 2002

Lawyers:  Settlement Near in Challenge to School's Rebel Flag Ban

LEXINGTON, KY (AP) -- Just before the trial was to begin over a teenager who was suspended from high school for wearing a T-shirt bearing the image of the Confederate flag, lawyers told the court they were about to settle the case.

An order filed Sept. 10 in U.S. District Court in Lexington revealed the settlement. Lawyers would not discuss details, but said it should be made final within 30 days.

"I don't want to upset any apple carts," explained attorney Kirk David Lyons of the Southern Legal Resource Center in North Carolina, a nonprofit group devoted to protecting the civil rights of people involved in Southern-heritage issues.

He represents Timothy Castorina, who was the only remaining plaintiff in the First Amendment lawsuit. Initially, his friend Tiffany Dargavell was also a party, but she dropped out of the fight after the suit was dismissed and before it was reinstated by the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

Castorina and Dargavell wore "Southern Thunder" T-shirts to Madison Central High School Sept. 17, 1997, to commemorate what would have been Hank Williams Sr.'s 74th birthday. The school's principal at the time, William Fultz, ordered the pair to turn the shirts inside out or change. The flag image, Fultz said, violated the school dress code that prohibited anything with an "illegal, immoral or racist implication."

Castorina, then a junior, and Dargavell, a freshman, refused to cooperate, and their parents took an equally stubborn line, saying black students wore Malcolm X shirts and were never ordered to change. The students were suspended for three days and returned to school in the same shirts, prompting a second suspension from which they never returned. Instead, they were home-schooled.

During its first go-round in U.S. District Court, Judge Henry Wilhoit Jr. ruled that T-shirts were not a form of speech and threw out the case. But a three-judge panel of the 6th Circuit found he had erred and ordered a trial held.

According to documents in the court record, Madison Central was concerned about the Confederate flag, Malcolm X and many other T-shirts whose messages could offend. The school suffered from racial strife, according to Fultz and other administrators, and the trouble manifested itself in racist graffiti and three fights.

Castorina and Dargavell, however, denied that the school was marred by racial strife. In a sworn statement, Castorina said he suspected such claims were "a deliberate attempt on the part of the administration to make race relations appear worse then they were."

© September 12, 2002, The Associated Press