Ebony Davis was a junior at Layton High in Utah in 2022, a rising star on the varsity basketball team who says she had good grades and was enjoying her high school experience. But, according to a lawsuit she filed last month, that experience was marred by a barrage of racist, demeaning remarks she endured from other students and from the school’s former basketball coach.
In her complaint, Davis, who is Black and of African-American and Hispanic descent, says she was regularly called the N-word by her white peers while walking to class and often had students ask her for “an N-word pass” so they could use the racial slur without recourse.
Students also touched her hair without permission, and one student turned off the lights in a classroom and shouted, “Oh, where did Ebony go?!” she alleges.
Meanwhile, her basketball coach, Robert Reisbeck, who was also the school’s athletics director, regularly directed statements at Davis that were “racially charged and demeaning,” she claims.
Some comments focused on her appearance, such as when Reisbeck allegedly asked the team to line up from tallest to shortest and commented in front of her teammates that Davis’ hair did not “count” towards her overall height or said that a ball that hit her in the head during practice didn’t hurt her “because she has cushioning.”
On other occasions when economic matters were discussed, Reisback would state that money was “a White people problem,’ implying that Black people do not have money and are broke,” the complaint says.
During scrimmages, Reisbeck allegedly said, “Oh look, I put the only Black girl on the white team,” and “The white team needs a girl with hops.”
During Black History Month, Davis says he told her, “It’s your month, we have to treat you special,” and directed other students “to carry Ms. Davis to get a drink ‘because you’re special.’”
Such comments had a cumulative effect of making Davis feel uncomfortable, anxious, embarrassed and harassed, to the point that she wanted “to quit a sport she dearly loved,” the complaint says. She “deliberately allowed her grades to fall” so that her grade point average was 1.98, below the 2.0 GPA required for student-athletes, “so that she would have to stop playing.”
An assistant coach who noticed that Davis was uncomfortable around Reisbeck and who “was aware of the repeated negative, racially charged remarks that Reisbeck had made” towards Davis reported his behavior to an assistant principal,” the lawsuit says.
That assistant principal allegedly took six weeks and the prodding of an attorney to relay that report of racial harassment to the Davis School District’s Office of Equity, in violation of the district’s 2021 settlement agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, which had found that “severe, pervasive and objectively offensive race-based harassment” was regularly committed in schools across the district, by both students and staff.
Reisbeck received a written reprimand from the district and was transferred to a different position in May of 2024, the lawsuit claims. He remains a social studies teacher at the school, according to the school’s website.
The district agreed to take multiple steps to end racial harassment and the racially hostile atmosphere in its schools, including revamping its policies and procedures, training staff, and developing a central reporting and complaint management system for racial discrimination complaints.
The complaint notes that the district has missed some important deadlines, including implementing a professional development plan to teach staff how to identify, report and respond to racial harassment and a student engagement plan to provide age-appropriate bullying and harassment intervention programming to all district students, according to an August 2023 memorandum presented to the district board.
Last January, former district employee Joscelin Thomas, who was hired in 2022 by the district’s newly-created Office of Equal Opportunity to investigate and respond to complaints of racial harassment, sued the district for racially discriminating against her.
Thomas, whose contract was not renewed in 2023, said in her complaint that the district had denied her training and mentorship opportunities, changed her investigative findings, and treated her “as a subordinate, rather than a colleague.” She settled with the district in June for an undisclosed amount.
Davis, now a 19-year-old student at Weber State University in nearby Ogden, told the Salt Lake Tribune that she still has a deep love for sports and is currently studying sports nutrition. However, she feels the racial harassment she outlined in the lawsuit hindered her college opportunities, including the chance to play basketball at the collegiate level.
For Davis, the racial harassment was so severe and pervasive “that she deliberately abandoned her education, avoided the basketball court altogether, and experienced loss of reputation, loss of association, fear, anxiety and humiliation,” the complaint says.
She is seeking a jury trial to determine general, special and punitive damages from the district and from Reisbeck, whom she argues in the lawsuit are well aware of the “constitutionally inappropriate racist culture in the District” and the DOJ’s “threat hanging over the district to eradicate its federal funding, and still continue to engage in overt racial harassment against a Black student.”
Her legal pursuit of punitive damages against Reisbeck is aimed at delivering “a message” to him and to the district to clean up its “racially discriminatory environment … a message that has not been received with sufficient force,” the lawsuit says. “Imposing individual financial accountability on individual wrongdoers, which otherwise will simply be covered by the State Risk Management Fund, will be the spark that Ms. Davis deserves and that the citizens of Utah need.”
A spokesperson for the Davis School District said they don’t comment on active litigation but issued this statement:
“Davis School District continues to prioritize safety and belonging as it is foundational to a child’s emotional and academic development. We stand firmly against any form of harassment or discrimination in our schools.”
“A single student experience with harassment is intolerable and contrary to our mission,” the statement continued, “and we take those reports seriously.”
According to a district report shared publicly in July, the school district has made “structural progress” on its DOJ-imposed plan, but students of color are still experiencing “ongoing and frequent” racial harassment in their day-to-day lives.
Roughly 71,000 students are enrolled in the Davis School District, and about 1 percent of them (or 710 students) are Black, the Tribune reported. During the 2023-24 school year, the district received more racial harassment complaints than there are Black students attending Davis schools.
About 83 percent of those 2,461 complaints were substantiated, according to the report. Of those, 570 cases were found to involve harassment, while the rest, though not classified as harassment, still violated the district’s discrimination policies.
The reported instances and consequential violations involved a total of 2,531 alleged student perpetrators. Of those, 341 were alleged to be repeat offenders, accounting for about 13 percent of the total.
“A point worth noting is that most students who violated the policy appear to correct their behavior and were not repeat offenders, which we attribute to our intervening measures,” the report states.
The district also received 57 reports of staff-on-student discrimination, 15 of which were substantiated. Over half of those substantiated cases met the definition of harassment.
Across all harassment reports, most involved derogatory language, according to the report. The most frequently used slur was the N-word, which was reported 863 times. About 85 percent of these involved elementary and middle school-aged children.
The report summed up the district’s second year of efforts to address racial harassment, discrimination and hostility in its schools by quoting a student who had participated in a focus group.
“The school has tried to do things to help, but they haven’t helped me,” the student said.
