‘Embarrassing’: KC-area principal runs on court to make team remove racial unity shirts
When Park Hill South’s interim principal, Kerrie Herren, ran out onto the volleyball court last Tuesday and demanded that the girls take off their “Together We Rise” warm-up shirts that instant, “it was just embarrassing,” said Abbie Day, the senior who’d proposed the shirts as a symbol of racial equity and inclusion.
Was that message a problem in the Riverside, Missouri, school, where just shy of 70% of the students are white? Was it the sight of three raised fists, in three different skin tones, that wasn’t acceptable? And why the on-court ambush, when the players had proudly worn their new shirts at an away game on Monday night, and again to school on Tuesday, without any problems?
“The coaches tried to be like, ‘It’s OK,’ but he was not taking that,” Day said. “He seemed angry.” In the moment, she and her teammates were more mortified than they were mad, though that came later. Players on the opposing team, from North Kansas City High School, had worn the shirts, too, in solidarity, and Herren asked some of them to take them off as well, without realizing they weren’t even his students.
“The next day,” according to Day, “we said, ‘What’s the problem?’’’
Day said athletic director John Carr answered that if they allowed this, they’d have to allow KKK shirts — and that Herren said MAGA shirts, too, would have to be sanctioned if the “Together We Rise” shirts were.
“I could not believe they were comparing a KKK shirt to a message of unity,” Day said. With the exception of one Black and one biracial player, the team is all white.
Day’s teammate, Daniella Dake, said they hadn’t seen the shirts as either a political statement or a controversial one. Since warm-ups supporting breast cancer research had previously been allowed, why was this message so threatening? “We’re told since we were little not to judge people by what they look like,” she said. “But we wore shirts with three skin colors on them, and suddenly we’re judged.”
Dake was especially “humiliated,” she said, to have to take off the shirt in front of two of her North Kansas City friends, one Black and one biracial. “It had to make them feel so unwelcome in our school.”
Coach reprimanded in front of students
On Wednesday, everyone involved was upset, and nothing was clarified. “The school never came out and said what the issue was,” said Dake’s mother, Angie Gaskill. “Our outspoken daughters were astounded. And they now see that a message of inclusion is not one everyone is open to.”
Before another game on Thursday night, Herren reprimanded the coach, Samantha Williams, in front of her players, telling her she’d been wrong and “exclusionary” in failing to consider the feelings of the two girls on the team, one of them a varsity player and one on the JV team, who hadn’t purchased the shirts.
Day responded by telling Herren that he was violating her First Amendment rights, and that she was going to wear the shirt to warm up in anyway — if, that is, he wasn’t going to suspend her as a result, or fire her coach. No, he wasn’t, Herren said, so she and a couple of the other players went ahead and wore them that night.
As it turned out, the parents of just one team member had complained to school officials that the shirts were making an inappropriately political statement, one they saw as tied to Black Lives Matter.
“They were just uncomfortable with it,” said Park Hill Superintendent Jeanette Cowherd.
On Friday, parents who did support the idea behind the shirts “all pushed back,” Gaskill said. Herren “told several of us he’d panicked,” and late Friday afternoon, he sent an email apologizing and sanctioning the shirts.
“The main lesson, even if it’s cheesy,” Day said, “is you have to stand up for what you believe in.”
Any high school senior who knows not only her own strength but that of the First Amendment as clearly as Day does is the kind of moral force that most adults could learn from.
Trump-supporting parents objected
The mother who had complained to school officials about the shirts did not return the message I left on her cellphone, and neither did Coach Williams.
Herren, though, did call me back. “When you make a mistake,” he told me, “you feel awful and lose sleep. It’s not a good feeling when you make a quick judgment in hopes of keeping everyone safe.”
Safe from what? “I was under the impression,” he said, that some players were being “pushed to do something they may or may not agree with.”
It’s Herren who has headed the school’s equity and inclusion efforts for the last three years, and those mean a lot to him, he said. So, as Gaskill said, he panicked? “When you say ‘panic,’ that would be a fair statement,” he said. “I did not want to open us up to the opposition” to racial inclusion.
Did he really say the school would, to be fair, then have to let students wear KKK and MAGA warm-ups? “I don’t know if I used that expression, but I did use MAGA.”
The parents who complained are outspoken Trump supporters.
Their daughter isn’t being ostracized or anything, Day said, even if “it does put her in a weird position.”
None of this should ever have happened, and isn’t erased by a belated “I’m sorry.” I am glad that Herren apologized, and that Cowherd did, too. When is the last time you heard anyone in leadership admit they were wrong?
It’s Day, though, who has the kind of fortitude that can’t be taught. She and Dake and all of those other young women at Park Hill South who stood up for people who don’t look like them learned that there is power in speaking truth to power. And that occasionally, power will even back down.
This story was originally published October 6, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
