A Milwaukee charter school punished a black teacher after he assigned a “Defend the KKK” essay to his 7th grade class.
Enough upset parents complained to the school board of the Business and Economic Academy of Milwaukee (BEAM) that the board suspended the teacher in question, reports the College Fix.
“We feel the choice of topic is inappropriate for a seventh-grade class,” BEAM said in a statement on the essay question.
Many parents did not think the persuasive essay topic was age appropriate for the language arts class.
“To even ask my child to write a paper like this – his mind, level of thinking, is not there yet,” parent Damaris Dorsey said. “I don’t teach him hate. So therefore, he does not know the in-depth of the Ku Klux Klan.”
The teacher assigned the essay topic after the class finished watching “To Kill a Mockingbird.” The assignment called for students to write from the perspective of a lawyer defending the KKK at a trial.
“The goal of this paper is not to teach students the Klan was correct in its behavior, but rather to teach the students how to write persuasively,” the assignment for the paper read.
Tory Lowe, a community activist, heard about the complaints from the students’ parents. He said that the topic was too heavy for children in 7th grade to wrestle with.
“These are young students, young children. This is not law class. If it was a Jewish child, they wouldn’t give him an assignment to defend Hitler,” Lowe argued.
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