School forced two students to remove US flags from trucks. Here’s what fellow students do next day.
Things got rolling, oddly enough, on Presidents Day.
Daniel Nunnally Jr. told WRIC-TV that he was in his weight-training class Monday at Dinwiddie (Virginia) High School when the “assistant principal came in and pulled me out of class and told me that I had to go outside to take both flags off my truck so there is no controversy or anything.”
The flags in question? The Gadsden (“Don’t Tread on Me”) flag — and the American flag.
“I kind of started getting angry, because what’s the problem with the American flag?” he told the station. “I asked her, ‘Is it the Don’t Tread on Me [flag] that you have a problem with? Because I can go take that one down real quick, but she told me both of them.”
You see, having to take down the Stars and Strips hit Nunnally pretty hard because he’s looking into joining the Army Reserves, WRIC said — and serving his country goes back a long way in his family.
“My entire family fought and died under that flag,” his father Daniel Nunnally Sr. told the station.
To make matters worse, another student got the same treatment that day, WRIC said.
But after a reporter at the station hit Facebook on Monday night with a video of Nunnally Jr. walking out to the school parking lot and taking down the flags, the post was shared quickly and in droves.
And the next morning over a dozen Dinwiddie High students showed up to the parking lot with American flags on their cars, WRIC reported.
The school changed course quickly, the station said.
On Monday, WRIC said the school indicated the flags were a safety concern since students might not be able to see out their rear windows. But by Tuesday the principal told the station he checked with local authorities and learned that as long two side mirrors allow drivers to see behind their vehicles, the flags can stay.
The principal added to WRIC that he doubts the assistant principal would’ve told Nunnally the flags might cause a “controversy.”
The ACLU added to the station Tuesday that “unless school officials can point to some specific reason to believe the student’s exercise of free speech will cause a major disruption of the school environment or educational process, it is illegal to stifle it. Neither that the speech is potentially controversial nor that they fear it will block the view from his vehicle is sufficient justification for this action.”
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