Poplar Bluff school district launched an investigation after a white high school student dressed as a Ku Klux Klan member for a class assignment.
“I’m not going to lie, there’s racism. … But there’s racism in every town you live in,” Poplar Bluff resident Brianna Anthony told the Springfield News-Leader on Nov. 9.
Anthony is a 2017 graduate of Poplar Bluff High School and shared a screenshot of the student wearing the KKK outfit on her Facebook page. The photo was circulating all over SnapChat and she immediately shared the image to her social media.
“I immediately screenshotted it. I know for a fact it was taken by someone who was there,” said Anthony.
(Poplar Bluff High School Student wearing KKK outfit/ SnapChat)
Students in a history class were asked by their professor to dress up as part of a school assignment. They were each divided into study groups and were instructed to create class presentations on U.S. Constitution amendments. The student who wore overtly racist garb was assigned to present on the 15th Amendment, which forbids the federal government from denying people voting rights on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”
Local TV station KFVS reported that the Poplar Bluff School District said they believe the student did not intend to act in a discriminatory manner.
Anthony said she’s “never ever heard of a history teacher who said it was OK to use a KKK costume for a project.”
“When people walk into that classroom and see that uniform, that’s automatically a red flag,” Anthony told the News-Leader newspaper.
School officials suspended the teacher responsible for creating the history lesson and are still conducting an investigation.
