Vance County Schools Superintendent Norm Shearin is furious about a flier making the rounds in Vance County that accuses his school system of “RACIAL DISCRIMINATION!”
The flier has been left on cars around town, including at Board of Education member Emeron Cash’s church Sunday. The 8.5-by-11-inch “news alert” is from the Vance-Granville Local Organizing Committee.
That’s the organization that Anthony Evans identified himself with when he appeared before the school board last month to complain what he claimed to be discriminatory policies on the hairstyles allowed on high school athletes in Vance.
“I’ve had it,” Shearin told Cash and fellow school board members Tommy Riddle and Robert Duke after Wednesday morning’s meeting of the board’s Finance Committee.
“He is making statements that are blatantly false,” the superintendent said.
Dwain Coleman, who heads the Granville County chapter of the NAACP, has appeared before the school board the past two months to complain about the treatment of a Southern Vance basketball player with a long ethnic hairstyle.
The student was allowed to play the entire season without cutting his hair, and no other students or parents of athletes have come forward to complain about coaches’ hair policies.
Cash said people always bring allegations of discrimination in the schools to him, but he never heard of any incident involving Southern Vance and athletes’ hair. Therefore, he said, “I don’t see how it happened.”
“It didn’t happen,” Shearin said.
He said this is a case of an outside agitator trying to stir things up. No one in Vance has responded, Shearin said, so the Granville people keep trying different approaches.
“I am not aware of any Vance County person involved,” Shearin said.
The flier, which includes a non-Vance phone number on the top, urges the black community to “rise up. … You can accomplish what you will!”
The three-paragraph statement accuses some unnamed coaches, with the backing of Shearin and the school board, of imposing an unwritten policy “that bans Black students from participating in sports because they wear dreadlocks and/or braids.”
That statement was enough to anger Shearin, who called it a lie and said coaches must have the authority to control their teams. But he was offended by the last paragraph of the flier, which attacks the Board of Education’s three black members, Cash, Margaret Ellis and Gloria White.
“Members of the Board of Education who are African-Americans have not opened their mouth against this blatant attack against our youth, but have continued going along just to get along,” the flier reads. “There is no ‘Black’ representation on the Board of Education in Vance County.”
Shearin said that’s insulting to the board members, and it’s going too far.
“I was really shocked,” Cash said.
“It’s always something,” Shearin said.
No one has signed up to speak at Monday night’s school board meeting. Shearin said the board can bar speakers who aren’t from Vance.
Otherwise, Riddle said, people are allowed to speak for three minutes as long as they don’t launch personal attacks and aren’t deemed to be harassing anyone.