‘Better Off During Segregation’: Black North Carolina Teens Called Cockroaches In School Newspaper Faced More Racist Attacks from Adults After Local Broadcast Aired Their Experience, Lawsuit Says

A federal appeals court decided this week to allow Davina Ricketts, a former North Carolina high school student, to continue pursuing her racial discrimination lawsuit against the Wake County Public School System, its board of education, and numerous school officials. Ricketts alleges that school and district officials did not intervene and were “deliberately indifferent” to the racial harassment and cyberbullying she endured from other students during and after a student council election in 2016. The decision of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals on Tuesday reversed a trial judge’s order in 2022 dismissing Ricketts’ lawsuit and sent it back to the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Davina Ricketts says she faced constant and severe racial bullying after running for student council at William G. Enloe Magnet High School located in Raleigh, North Carolina. (Photos: Facebook and LinkedIn) Ricketts was a sophomore at Enloe High School in 2016 when she decided to run for student council “in hopes of remedying its lack of diversity,” noted Appeals Court Judge Roger Gregory in his opinion on behalf of a unanimous three-judge panel. Instead, she “was met with racial harassment” and bullying from her peers, he wrote. That included...