A Tennessee school district has reached an agreement with the Department of Justice after an investigation uncovered several racist harassment episodes.
The Justice Department launched an investigation into the Hawkins County School District in 2023 following a lawsuit by the mother of a student who faced most of the harassment. The investigation, under Titles IV and VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 found the district “deliberately indifferent to known race-based harassment in its schools, violating the equal protection rights of Black students.”
“No student should endure mock slave auctions or racial slurs meant to invoke a shameful period in our country’s history when Black people were treated as subhuman,” Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division said in a statement. “Racial harassment undermines a student’s ability to feel safe, eliminates any hope for fostering a supportive educational environment and violates the Constitution’s most basic promise of equal protection.”
The student, identified as “K.R.” in the lawsuit, experienced 12 racial harassment incidents during the 2021-22 school year, which involved “public humiliation in the common areas of his school.” One incident that was described included some students holding a “slave auction,” in which K.R was “sold” to the highest bidder.
Under the agreement with the Justice Department, the district will implement a set of eight changes over the next few years. Some changes include hiring someone to oversee racial harassment complaints, updating racial harassment policies, and training staff to identify racial harassment.
“Our school system is – and always has been – dedicated to serving and protecting all students, regardless of race,” Hawkins County Director of Schools Matt Hixson said. “Therefore, we entered into the agreement with DOJ to continue pursuing those same goals, and we look forward to working with the Department regarding the same in the future.”
Still, school district officials said they disagreed with the department’s findings. Hixson told the Review that Hawkins County Schools “disagrees with the Department’s findings and conclusions related to allegations of race-based harassment and/or violence, and disagrees that it or its agents acted with deliberate indifference.”
In addition to the “slave auction,” the Justice Department investigated other racist incidents, such as the repeated and open use of the N-word and a “monkey of the month” campaign that mocked black students.
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The mother of the child at the center of the lawsuit said the school knowingly condoned the racial harassment of K.R., which in turn deprived him of his civil rights of equal access to educational opportunity.
The Board of Education agreed to a $110,000 settlement for the mother and son in what started as a $2.5 million lawsuit against the district. Of that, $50,181 will be spent on legal expenses and $59,819 will be put into an interest-bearing account to pay for K.R.’s educational needs.