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By Katy Reckdahl, The Times-Picayune
October 30, 2009, 6:10AM
Brother Martin students wore black masks during a pep rally before last Friday's football game against St. Augustine High School, a historically black school, said Brother Martin President John Devlin, but they had no intention of igniting a racial controversy.
Rather, Devlin said, the students were spoofing the Batman movie "The Dark Knight," because St. Augustine teams are known as the Purple Knights.
Devlin said the students at the Gentilly school, where 88 percent of the 1,200 students are white and 11 percent are black, write and perform skits for all of their football pep rallies. He said both black and white students were involved in the writing and performance of the St. Aug skit.
But the spoof fell flat at St. Augustine, where the school's principal, the Rev. John Raphael, viewed photos of the rally on Wednesday.
"Everyone was quite disturbed," Raphael said, because the images, posted on Brother Martin's Web site, "depict St. Aug students in a very negative way."
The pictures have since been removed from the school's Web site.
The five Brother Martin students -- one black teen and four white teens -- could have simply dressed in St. Augustine purple and gold, Raphael said. But when they covered their faces with black scarves, he said, "it's very difficult not to see that as traditional blackface."
A costumed figure representing Brother Martin wore a shroud over his face as well. It was crimson, one of the school's colors.
And while one would naturally expect the Brother Martin students to triumph over St. Aug in a pep rally skit, this skit ended with the protagonist, a detective, putting the lone black student on the floor in an arrest position, Raphael said.
The two schools' principals spoke on Wednesday and both vowed to make it "a teachable moment."
"Obviously there was not sufficient adult supervision to make sure that ... insensitive images and actions (weren't) portrayed," Devlin said on Thursday, saying that "we failed to do that in this case."
Raphael addressed his students on Thursday and counseled them to respond "in a positive and thoughtful way" to the matter.
Jacob Washington, a junior at St. Aug, seemed to take that to heart. "I can see how somebody could break it down, to say it was racially inappropriate," he said. But Washington preferred to think that it was more about school spirit that went too far.
That reaction is too kind, said Terry Jackson, who graduated from St. Augustine in 1981 and received the photos in an e-mail message, which he said now has been forwarded from Chicago to Atlanta to Los Angeles.
"You got some irate, upset alumni right now," he said Thursday evening -- including a group in his living room.
People are offended, he said, that a black Brother Martin student was "subjected" to the fake arrest in the skit and they believe that the adults shirked responsibility.
"You can't tell me some adult didn't know about the skit beforehand," he said. "And when the skit began, somebody in that gym should have stepped up and said, 'Time out. This isn't right.' "
But Washington and his friends said that while they are determined to see that school officials deals with it properly, they saw the incident as a "misunderstanding."
"We don't want to make it seem like we're a hostile school, because we're not," Washington said.
Sarah Carr also contributed to this report.
October 30, 2009, 6:10AM
Brother Martin students wore black masks during a pep rally before last Friday's football game against St. Augustine High School, a historically black school, said Brother Martin President John Devlin, but they had no intention of igniting a racial controversy.
Rather, Devlin said, the students were spoofing the Batman movie "The Dark Knight," because St. Augustine teams are known as the Purple Knights.
Devlin said the students at the Gentilly school, where 88 percent of the 1,200 students are white and 11 percent are black, write and perform skits for all of their football pep rallies. He said both black and white students were involved in the writing and performance of the St. Aug skit.
But the spoof fell flat at St. Augustine, where the school's principal, the Rev. John Raphael, viewed photos of the rally on Wednesday.
"Everyone was quite disturbed," Raphael said, because the images, posted on Brother Martin's Web site, "depict St. Aug students in a very negative way."
The pictures have since been removed from the school's Web site.
The five Brother Martin students -- one black teen and four white teens -- could have simply dressed in St. Augustine purple and gold, Raphael said. But when they covered their faces with black scarves, he said, "it's very difficult not to see that as traditional blackface."
A costumed figure representing Brother Martin wore a shroud over his face as well. It was crimson, one of the school's colors.
And while one would naturally expect the Brother Martin students to triumph over St. Aug in a pep rally skit, this skit ended with the protagonist, a detective, putting the lone black student on the floor in an arrest position, Raphael said.
The two schools' principals spoke on Wednesday and both vowed to make it "a teachable moment."
"Obviously there was not sufficient adult supervision to make sure that ... insensitive images and actions (weren't) portrayed," Devlin said on Thursday, saying that "we failed to do that in this case."
Raphael addressed his students on Thursday and counseled them to respond "in a positive and thoughtful way" to the matter.
Jacob Washington, a junior at St. Aug, seemed to take that to heart. "I can see how somebody could break it down, to say it was racially inappropriate," he said. But Washington preferred to think that it was more about school spirit that went too far.
That reaction is too kind, said Terry Jackson, who graduated from St. Augustine in 1981 and received the photos in an e-mail message, which he said now has been forwarded from Chicago to Atlanta to Los Angeles.
"You got some irate, upset alumni right now," he said Thursday evening -- including a group in his living room.
People are offended, he said, that a black Brother Martin student was "subjected" to the fake arrest in the skit and they believe that the adults shirked responsibility.
"You can't tell me some adult didn't know about the skit beforehand," he said. "And when the skit began, somebody in that gym should have stepped up and said, 'Time out. This isn't right.' "
But Washington and his friends said that while they are determined to see that school officials deals with it properly, they saw the incident as a "misunderstanding."
"We don't want to make it seem like we're a hostile school, because we're not," Washington said.
Sarah Carr also contributed to this report.