Friend,

Inside the door to Amy Donofrio’s classroom, Black students felt safe.

It was not always that way anywhere else at Robert E. Lee High School. Named after the commander of the Confederate Army who was a slaveholder and white supremacist, the school in Jacksonville, Florida, was segregated until 1971. Its sports teams are called the Generals. And while today 72% of its 1,600 students are Black, its school colors, chosen by white school leaders of another era, remain the blue and gray of the Confederacy.

But in the classroom of beloved teacher Donofrio, Black students could shut out the vitriol, racism and anxiety that pervaded their lives.

There, Donofrio’s students – largely Black, economically disadvantaged, juggling school and jobs and sometimes scarred by violence in their communities – formed a family of sorts. They came to believe in the white teacher who had their backs.

What started as a life skills class for Black youth evolved into a dialectic on empowerment, racial justice and human rights – and eventually into a movement that lifted the students and Donofrio to a meeting with then-President Barack Obama and honors at Harvard University. By their actions and through their journey, the students reframed their sense of the possible. They came to believe in their own worth.

Against all that, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) banner tacked up outside the door to her classroom last fall seemed relatively benign, a simple statement of the fact and belief that underlay everything Donofrio taught.

But in March, a white alumnus, whose racially insensitive remarks at a school district meeting had gone viral through a social media post by Donofrio, complained about the banner. Over the pleas of Donofrio and her students, school authorities took it down. The school district contends the banner violated district policy, even though it had been hanging outside her door for months.

Donofrio says it was a statement of human rights.

“I was devastated, and I was enraged because I couldn’t understand how on earth any institution that is here to ensure the safety and well-being of our children could go up and remove a symbol of their safety and well-being,” Donofrio said. “I wanted students to be able to walk into my classroom and feel that they could breathe. And that’s what that flag did. It told them that they could let their guard down, at least in this one space, in this school named after a Confederate leader. I wanted them to know without a doubt that this was a safe space for them.”

A day after the school principal took down the flag, Donofrio was taken out of the classroom, banned from school grounds and told to report daily to a sort of “teacher jail” where she was assigned to non-teaching duties in a school district warehouse. Her students, many on the cusp of graduation, were cut off from the teacher who helped them fill out college application forms, instructed them how to seek financial aid and wept with them last year when a former student at Lee was gunned down by police.

The lawsuit

The Southern Poverty Law Center and its co-counsel, Scott Wagner and Associates, P.A., filed a federal lawsuit last month to uphold the rights of Donofrio and her students, including the right to express their support for Black Lives Matter. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida, alleges that the removal of the flag violated Donofrio’s First Amendment rights, as well as other legal protections. It names as defendants the Duval County Public School District and Scott Schneider, high school regional superintendent and former school principal.

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In solidarity,

Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center