A North Carolina middle school teacher is taking the matter of his termination to court after filing a lawsuit claiming his firing resulted from white parents’ complaints over the teaching of one book during Black History Month.
Markayle Gray was a seventh and eighth-grade teacher at Charlotte Secondary School. He claims he was fired by the school principal after the school faced backlash for his teaching of the book “Dear Martin,” a novel about a Black teenager’s struggle to grasp racial injustice after being racially profiled by law enforcement, according to the lawsuit obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
He assigned the book to his seventh-grade honors students in January 2023 ahead of the class’s Black History Month activities, the lawsuit states. The book had already been approved by school administrators and the school’s principal, Keisha Rock, who had reportedly recommended the book to Gray.
Upon learning of the book assignment, an unknown number of white parents complained that the novel “injected unwelcome political views on systemic racial inequality into their children’s classroom,” Gray’s lawyers stated in a press release.
An official complaint was also submitted to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction about critical race theory instruction at the school. State lawmakers passed a bill just this year restricting instruction over certain racial topics in school classrooms that make students feel guilty or responsible for past actions committed by people of the same race or sex.
The suit states that Rock sought to avoid more pressure by removing Gray from his position. Gray was subsequently fired on Feb. 2, 2023, in the middle of the school year. He was hired just four months prior to his firing in October 2022.
Now, Gray is suing the school and its board of directors who authorized his immediate termination, according to the lawsuit.
The board has a corrective action protocol in place for teachers that begins with verbal counseling and if needed, progresses to writeups and final warnings before termination is considered. The school also has an established conflict resolution policy in the case that parents seek corrective action against a teacher. That policy dictates that administration-managed dialogue between parents and teachers can be executed to find solutions.
However, neither of those procedures was carried out in Gray’s situation. He also wasn’t given a performance improvement plan.
Attorney Katie Weaver Hartzog who represents Charlotte Secondary School told ABC News, “Since this is a personnel matter, we are limited in what we can say about the reasons for Mr. Gray’s termination. However, I can say that the termination of Mr. Gray’s employment was based on legitimate, nondiscriminatory, non-retaliatory reasons. The school denies any and all allegations of wrongdoing and intends to vigorously defend the suit.”
The NCDPI said in a statement that it had no record of the legal complaint. However, if it “did, it would be considered a confidential personnel record as it relates to school employees and would therefore not be subject to public disclosure.”
Charlotte Secondary School is predominantly made up of students of color with 80 to 85 percent of the student population identifying as Black, Hispanic, or biracial. The school also wrote in its core principles that “Diversity is not merely desirable, it is necessary for the accomplishment of our mission.”
Gray also claims in the complaint that he learned from his colleagues that white teachers at the school have taught lessons on “politically polarizing topics from race to gender and sexual orientation without encountering corrective action or discipline from the school’s administration.”
The school has also fielded complaints from Black parents seeking corrective action against white teachers, including one complaint about a teacher who made a racially insensitive comment about the complexion of a Black student, according to the suit.
Gray wants to hold the board and the school accountable for “racially discriminatory conduct.” He’s seeking economic damages, including back pay, front pay, and lost benefits, including noneconomic compensatory damages and attorneys’ fees.
Gray’s attorneys claim that he is “another casualty of the book-banning sweeping American public education.”
“The conduct of Charlotte Secondary’s administration reflected a textbook racial double-standard: an African American teacher was swiftly terminated over parental concerns from whites, while white teachers have effectively been shielded from the complaints of black families,” the suit states.
“Principal Rock and the Charlotte Secondary Board of Directors seem to care more about bowing to political pressure than they do about following their own procedures and policies,” Gray’s lead attorney Artur Davis said in a statement. “All Markayle Gray did was teach a novel his supervisors had already approved and they fired him for it.”
