CHARLESTON, S.C. – A football coach was fired – but then reinstated – after parents complained about “racially insensitive” game celebrations.
Uptown Magazine reports:
A South Carolina high school football coach has been fired because his team’s post-game victories involved watermelon smashing and ape-like sounds.
The mostly white Academic Magnet High School football team would celebrate victories by smashing watermelons with smiling faces drawn on them while making ape-like chants. They would then eat the watermelon as a post-game snack. Superintendent Nancy McGinley says that a board member notified her of a parent on the opposing team who had been offended by the gestures.
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“It was reported to us that a player was selected to smash the watermelon … Players would gather in a circle and smash the watermelon while others either were standing in a group or locking arms and making chanting sounds that were described as ‘Ooo ooo ooo,’ and several players demonstrated the motion,” McGinley says, according to the Charleston City Paper.
The players would draw faces on the watermelons with a marker.
“It was a face that could be considered a caricature,” according to McGinley.
The NAACP likened the ritual “to a black football team urinating on the Confederate flag after games.”
Local NAACP chapter leader Dot Scott also said the celebration being defined as “fun” was also compared to the “fun” whites used to have lynching blacks, ABC 4 reports.
“The purchasing of the watermelon, the drawing of the face to me makes this issue not only inappropriate but highly disrespectful and highly insensitive,” school board member Michael Miller says.
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“I do recognize that children will be children, youth will be youth, and sometimes in their youthfulness they are not aware of the social ramification and implications of things that they do.”
After the school fired the coach, Bud Walpole, on Monday, Scott commended the district for “swift attention to an inappropriate and racially insensitive ritual.” He was not removed from his teaching position.
“The perceptions and the practices that were part of this ritual were not something that the adults should have sanctioned, and therefore we took action yesterday to relieve the head coach of his responsibilities,” McGinley says.
Uptown Magazine reports a petition was launched to reinstate Walpole. As of late Tuesday, it had 1,500 signatures.
And that’s precisely what happened.
After meeting with the coach, the superintendent issued a statement, reading part:
I feel good about our meeting, and I am confident that in his position as teacher, mentor and coach he will use the experience to deliver on his commitments, which are as follows:
1. I commit to teach all of the students to better respect the differences of others and to be sensitive to their feelings.
2. I will attend and participate with students in any sensitivity training sponsored or initiated by the district.
3. I will counsel my students before games to be extra vigilant in their actions when dealing with others of different racial or ethnic backgrounds.
While there are, and may continue to be, different perspectives on this chain of events, I would like to invite our community to join together with me and Coach Walpole to use this as a “teachable moment” for the benefit of our children.
“Taking into consideration the potential value that he will add to our students and the community, given this experience, I am asking him to resume his coaching duties effective Thursday, October 23, 2014,” McGinley concluded.
“It’s absurd, I think. Racism is real, but when you stretch it to the point of absurdity you diminish the reality of it,” state school board member Larry Kobrovsky says, according to the City Paper. “I think they need to act like adults and apologize to the parents and their kids.”
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