When They Come for You by David Kirby

Author:David Kirby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Suspended for Sitting During the Pledge

India Landry did not want to stand during the Pledge of Allegiance in school, in protest of police brutality and, more recently, the policies of Donald Trump. She had remained seated, she says, more than two hundred times in classes taught by six different teachers since the ninth grade, always without incident. But then the fierce public battle over NFL players “taking a knee” broke out, and things changed at school.

On October 2, 2017, the seventeen-year-old senior at Houston’s Windfern High School was sitting in the principal’s office when the pledge came over the loudspeaker. She did not stand up. The head principal, Martha Strother, expelled her from school on the spot.

Yet India remained seated. She was taken to the office of the assistant principal.

“Call your mother,” she ordered the student. “Tell her to come pick you up.” If that didn’t happen within five minutes, she warned the shaken girl, a police officer would be summoned to physically remove her from school.103

“This is not the NFL,” the assistant principal scolded, according to court documents that were later filed. India was going to stand for the pledge “like the other African Americans in your class,” she said.

“I was actually terrified; I see what’s going on with the country,” India’s mother, Kizzy Landry, told The New York Daily News.104

Kizzy called school officials, asking that India be allowed to return to class.

“No one can sit for the pledge at my school,” was the message relayed back from Principal Strother.

Three days after India’s expulsion, the Landrys managed to get a meeting with Strother, who insisted that India had to stand for the pledge as a condition of her returning to school. Sitting was “disrespectful,” she said. It would not be tolerated. She declared the meeting over.

That’s when a local TV reporter from KHOU Channel 11 called Strother about the “pledge controversy.” The resulting broadcast did not portray the school in a favorable light. “I don’t think that the flag is what it says it’s for, for liberty and justice and all that,” India told the reporter. “It’s not obviously what’s going on in America today.” The news account noted that India was just months away from graduating. “She may only have two options: stand or get her diploma. She knows her decision,” the reporter said.

“I wouldn’t stand because it goes against everything I believe in,” India explained.

The next morning, at around 8:40 a.m., Principal Strother called Kizzy. She had changed her mind. India could return to school, and she would not have to stand for the pledge. By 10:30 a.m., India was back in class.

Still, the Landrys were upset.

The two engaged legal counsel from the respected civil rights attorney Randall Kallinen, and on October 7, Kizzy Landry filed suit on behalf of her daughter in federal district court in Houston against Principal Strother and the Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District, the nation’s third largest.105

The lawsuit, which was brief, simple, and to the point, alleged that the district had violated India’s rights to free speech and due process under the First, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.

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