Comments rolled in at The Robesonian, too. Editor Donnie Douglas has worked at the paper for decades, and was in the office in 1988 when two armed Native Americans held the staff hostage for 10 hours to call attention to racism and local corruption. Three decades later, Douglas sees flashes of racism from time to time but thought people here had generally pulled together. It seems to him now that the country is cleaving apart profoundly, and the consequences are spreading to communities like his.
He points to the other story that ran on the same front page as the interview with Leach. It detailed the defacement of a monument that has stood two-stories tall outside the courthouse for 110 years with little notice until now: a marble obelisk topped with a statue of a Confederate soldier.
“If you’re offended by the knee, then you ought to be able to understand why people are offended by that Confederate soldier up there,” he says. “And if you’re offended by that Confederate soldier, you ought to be able to understand why people might be offended by taking the knee. But everybody’s talking, nobody’s listening. There’s no empathy left in this country.”
When Douglas heard about the girls’ protest, he passed on assigning a story. He was short-staffed anyway, and he saw little value in helping dig those trenches deeper.
“Did you hear?” Cary Lewis asks his buddies as they settle in for their weekly Thursday dinner of ham hocks and deer steaks at a friend’s house near Lumberton, the Robeson County seat. Sometimes, the men watch Fox News and talk politics. These days, they turn on football and bemoan the national anthem protests that, to them, represent an unraveling of American values of tradition, patriotism and honor.
“At South Robeson High School,” Lewis tells the group, “they done the exact same thing.”
“It’s nothing but follow-the-leader,” one says.
“Follow-the-leader,” Lewis agrees.
He first caught wind of the incident on Facebook. Shocked that students at a school in his county would disrespect the flag, he reposted the news. Comments piled up. Lewis deleted the nastiest — the ones with foul language — and he saw some of the cheerleaders chime in. Word spread.
In a small engine repair shop, Billy Hunt’s phone started ringing. Hunt, a Native American and a Marine in the school’s booster club, answered call after call from those who had heard about the cheerleaders’ protest and were no longer willing to support an upcoming fundraising raffle.
Hunt was hurt, because he thinks the girls failed to consider people like him, those who served their country and see the flag as a symbol of that service, of loved ones and limbs lost to war. It seemed to him that they’d chosen a side, without imagining life on the other one.
“I’d like to see it back to people start feeling for each other again,” Hunt says, “instead of: ‘Well, it’s my idea, it’s great. If it’s your idea, it sucks.’”
Lewis, who is white and a retired state trooper, also came to view the back-and-forth as evidence of a nation losing its way.
“People in this country ... they’re already losing respect in a lot of areas. It’s the national anthem and the flag now. What’s going to be next?” he asked his friends that Thursday night. “Think of ... China or Korea. What if they did not respect their country like these people are not respecting ours? Just think what they would do to them. I’m not saying we should do that to our people. ... But they teach their people respect.”
Lewis was a registered Democrat all his life. He eats breakfast at the same diner every day, and one morning last year as the primaries drew near, he and a handful of others got up from their tables, marched down to the elections office, and asked to change their registrations. They wanted to vote for Trump, because he talked like them and promised to restore the values they hold dear.
Lewis thinks complaints of racism are overblown and Trump is being unfairly condemned, but he says he would be interested in hearing what the cheerleaders have to say because he figures they must have some reason for doing what they did. He might have listened, he adds, if they’d expressed their grievances in a different way — maybe by taking their problems to elected officials or to church, maybe by kneeling in prayer and not defiance.
Almost three weeks after the protest on his field, South Robeson High School Principal Christopher Clark was still sorting through how he and his school had gotten so caught up in the tug-of-war over racial equality and nationalism.
“We’ve got a cultural battle going on for the heart and soul of America,” he says. “We’ve heard, ‘We’re taking this country back.’ Well, where do you want to take it?”
He understands that to some, that might harken back to the wholesome world of Ozzie and Harriet. But that was also a time when Clark, a Native American, had to go to the pharmacy through the back door.
Clark’s school is in the poorest pocket of one of the poorest counties in North Carolina. The student body is almost entirely minority, split approximately evenly between African-Americans and Native Americans. Some of his students have never left the county. During a fieldtrip to Fayetteville, he discovered kids who’d never seen an escalator. When “life is so different depending on where your zip code is,” he says, he doesn’t know how anyone can believe that inequality no longer exists, even if he’s not happy about how his cheerleaders chose to demonstrate against it.
A preacher’s son and a devout Christian, Clark would never have knelt had he been a kid on the field that night, and he wouldn’t have allowed his own children to, either. But he doesn’t believe he gets to make those choices for everybody else. Nor did the local school district. In the wake of the NFL protests, the superintendent had sent out a memo reminding administrators of students’ constitutional right to protest, stating they could not be forced to stand during the anthem or punished for declining to.
Clark tried to explain all of this when the ugly messages arrived. “You don’t have the guts to lead,” read one note from a friend. One after the other, the notes kept coming. Public outrage is not the rule of law, the principal tried to remind folks, but it seemed that many would rather it were.
“When we start down the road of ‘the other’ — the other is wrong, the other is un-American, the other, the other, the other — where will we stop?” he wonders. “There will be a day when we look back on this and think: What in the world happened to us?”
And so on a Wednesday afternoon before the next home football game, Clark couldn’t help but worry that the cheerleaders practicing down the hall would choose to kneel again and start this heartache all over.
The girls had their own worries: that their message was lost amid the anger and condemnation.
At the first game after the protest, homecoming, they decided to stay in the locker room as the national anthem played.
Then they discussed again what to do at the next. Kneel, and relaunch their mini-culture war? Stay inside, and let it pass?
So they marched out onto the field that next Friday night.
They stood along the sidelines and just held hands, a sign of unity, they hoped, each one of them up on both feet.
No one booed. No one applauded them, either.
The girls turned around, picked up their pompoms and launched their first cheer.
“Go Mustangs!”
