NORTHFOLK, Va. – Booker T. Washington High School students staged a walkout on Monday to put a white administrator on blast and illuminate her racist Twitter rant at interracial dating at a predominantly black student body.
The tweet showed a picture of a long line of seven white girls in what appear to be prom dresses, each accompanied by an African-American male date in a tuxedo. The picture was captioned: “every white girl’s father’s worst nightmare or nah.”
It came from an account called @OrNahhTweets, which was retweeted by assistant principal Amy Strickland, a white woman. Even though the retweet had been sent out in June, it was just recently noticed by students—though it has since been taken down and the entire account deleted.
More than a dozen students took matters in their own hands after they said school officials wouldn’t respond to their complaints about the content of the tweet.
Student Michael Lemelle explained why the content of the tweet would be offensive to him and every other African-American, particularly males.
“Me being a young African-American, I don’t think of myself as anyone’s worst nightmare,” Lemelle explained.
The action by the Booker T. Washington students was covered by a large swath of national media, now putting enormous pressure on the school district to administer sanctions against the offending administrator.
“We will not tolerate racism in this city and definitely not in the education system,” Norfolk Branch NAACP President Joe Dillard said, according to the New York Daily News.
“Booker T. is the only [Norfolk] school that is not accredited, so to have students walking out, that shows the administration we need some type of action to this assistant principal, of some magnitude, so we can get back on track with what we need to be addressing at that school,” Dillard said.
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