School bans Confederate flags. Lone black teen at all-white Montana school has surprising response.
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LIVINGSTON — The lone black student at Park High School, Darius Ivory, said Thursday he doesn't see flying the Confederate flag as racist.
Following multiple shoving matches, shouted threats and other disturbances that distracted students from their education, Park High School has banned displaying the confederate flag on school property, Park High Vice Principal Tim Gauthier said.
"There was no valuable education that day," Gauthier said about the incidents.
The heated debate over whether preventing the flag from flying was violating First Amendment rights or if allowing the flag to fly was promoting racism has caused tension in the rural Montana town that, according to the 2010 census, has a black population of 0.3 percent.
Ivory, a recent transfer student from Houston, Texas, said he's never felt threatened by the Confederate symbol. He was raised around it.
"I don't see it as a bad thing," he said. "I'm not a slave, and it takes way more than flying a flag to faze me."
The 19-year-old Ivory moved to Montana and just started at Park High School when a rumor began to spread around the school that another student, a 17-year-old, had made some sort of threat against him. Another student, Alexis Bowman, said she heard a white student had threatened to hang and drag Ivory behind his truck.
When school administrators heard the rumor, Gauthier said he contacted the 17-year-old. The student denied threatening Ivory, but acknowledged making negative statements about the black student.
"He comes out and said he doesn't like black people and is racist," Gauthier said. "In my 20 years as an educator, I'd never heard someone admit they were racist."
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