A public school system in North Carolina has revised its dress code to prohibit the Confederate flag, Ku Klux Klan symbols and swastikas from clothing, reports The Los Angeles Times.
The Durham Public Schools board vote unanimously Thursday to make the change, report local news outlets. The Herald-Sun of Durham reports that board members had previously expressed support for the change during a work session last week. On Aug. 14, protestors toppled a Confederate statue in front of the old count courthouse at Duke University in Durham in the wake of a white nationalist and neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va. that resulted in the death of three people.
One board member, Mike Lee, said, “These things, historically, were meant for hate, or at some point in history, meant hatred.”
The board also voted 7-0 to remove a the name of Durham industrialist and philanthropist Julian Shakespeare Carr from the middle school building at Durham School of the arts, which once housed an all-white high school, reports The L.A. Times.
Back in 1913, at the dedication of the Confederate memorial at UNC Chapel Hill, Carr, who himself was a Confederate Civil War veteran, spoke about the “purity of the Anglo-Saxon race” and described how he once beat an African-American woman because she insulted a white woman.
Protestors gathered at the memorial earlier this week to call for officials to take it down.
Workers began removing some of the plaques with Carr’s name from the building on Friday. The administration plans to review the names of all its schools and school buildings as well.
Carr supported local black leaders and provided financial support to help launch N.C. Central University, a historically black college in Durham, but Durham Public Schools Superintendent Bert L’Homme said that for all his contributions, the “values he espoused and the brutal actions he claimed to take in no way reflect the safe and inclusive community that we are building in Durham Public Schools.”
Neighboring school systems such as Orange County and Chapel Hill-Carrboro have issued similar bans.
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