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Students Protest After Minnesota High School Denies Approval for Some Black History Month Posters

Students of color protested in their high school in Chaska, Minnesota, on March 1, after they said the school administration denied approval for some Black History Month poster themes, including Malcolm X.

In an interview with Storyful on March 1, Tonya Blackstone-Coleman said her daughter, Faith Blackstone, was disappointed by her school’s lack of materials or curriculum on black history during February and decided to organize with friends to make posters themselves.

“Faith and her friends were given permission by the principal to create a series of eight posters celebrating Black History Month to be displayed at her school in response to them going to the principal to complain why there was no mention of BHM at their school…Her and her friends met outside of school on their day off this past Monday to research the content for their posters,” said Blackstone-Coleman.

“Faith put the first poster together and took it to school. She submitted it to the equity rep at the school for approval before she put it up and was told it couldn’t be put up. She also submitted a list of the other poster topics and Malcolm X, Tamir Rice and Emmett Till were flagged as not OK either. When I called the school to find out why, I was told that they ‘could be seen as negative’ and that they have to ‘meet the community where they are’,” Blackstone-Coleman said.

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Blackstone-Coleman said she organized a public viewing of the posters for March 6 at the Chaska Event Center.

Approved poster topics included Frederick Douglass, Coretta Scott King, Muhammed Ali, Michael Jordan, Aretha Franklin, and the Tuskegee Airmen.

In her post on Facebook, Faith Blackstone wrote, “Today, I led my fellow classmates into a protest against the school’s racist ideology of wanting to whitewash and censor our history, Black history, AMERICAN HISTORY. The school knew better than to try and stop us, but white ‘All lives matter’ students also tried to get in our faces and followed us back to class.”

Blackstone-Coleman said this is not the first racially sensitive incident and unsatisfactory administrative response that her family and other families of color have experienced with District 112, where her children attend middle and high school.

She described an incident where several white students were admitted to a high school football game while in blackface. In another incident involving white students posting on SnapChat, Chaska’s principal Jim Bach made headlines after he sent a memo to parents saying that the incident was a “teachable moment.”

In December 2018, an African-American middle school boy found a racial slur written on his shirt after gym class. “And these are just the incidents that got media attention,” said Blackstone-Coleman in an interview with Storyful.

Storyful has asked Chaska High School principal Jim Bach for comment. Credit: Faith Blackstone via Storyful