2015/06/08 – The Mississippi NAACP is outraged at the treatment of the family members of Senatobia High School graduating senior Lanarcia Walker.

Senatobia Municipal School District Superintendent Jay Foster filed ‘disturbing the peace’ charges against Walker’s family members after they yelled encouragement at her graduation. Days after the ceremony, officers issued warrants for their arrests with a possible $500 bond.  Family members were informed that they “did willfully and unlawfully disturb the public peace of Jay Foster … by use of loud boisterous noise, by yelling and clapping” as Walker approached the stage.

The four family members charged were initially expected in court in early June.

The MSNAACP sees these charges as a gross waste of judicial system resources.  We live in a country where law enforcement regularly targets black and Hispanic people over most other races for invasive police searches and frightening harassment.  We are a nation where the court system routinely hands out harsher sentences to minority defendants over white defendants.  Blacks suffer an incarceration rate that is six times the national average.  In Mississippi, the black incarceration rate is 3.5 blacks for every one white prisoner.

To see school officials involve police in a situation where a family merely fails to contain their joy at their daughter’s once-in-a-lifetime achievement is an egregious overuse of police power—in a society that is increasingly militaristic in its interaction with minorities.

We are outraged that a nation so eager to destroy young lives over even mild legal mischief would be equally eager to involve the court at a time when society should be most proud: a daughter’s graduation.

At the very worst, the offending family members should have been escorted from the facility at the time of their disruption.  That Mr. Foster later launched charges against the family days after the fact reveals a lingering animosity toward Walker’s relatives that we find unhealthy in a school official charged with educating children.

To punish a proud family for being delighted at their daughter’s hard work and perseverance sends entirely the wrong message to youth and family.  There is a time and place for court intervention.  This was not it.

Source: Mississippi NAACP Writers