by John Cargile

Created on: May 25, 2008

The American Civil Liberties Union and the ACLU of Alabama filed a complaint in a class-action lawsuit last week charging Monroe County school officials with subjecting African American students at Monroeville Junior High School to the widespread use of racial epithets and slurs, racially-motivated discipline, and racially segregated classrooms, practices that deny African American students their constitutional right to equal educational opportunities.

This south Alabama town was the inspiration and setting for Harper Lee's book "To Kill a Mockingbird." The ACLU lawsuit is a backdrop for a real-life legal case involving racism. Lee's monumental and popular book, whose coming of age-tale discussed racism and injustice in the 1930's, has also been taken to task in Pasadena, CA as the NAACP attempts to ban Lee"s book in a classroom curriculum.

The more things change, the more things remain the same. But that is why Lee's book is so important today. It shows that in the South nothing much has changed since the Civil War. This is also a subject being explored in my new novel, Decoration Day." We must learn from history or we are apt to repeat it.

"Students at Monroeville Junior High are systematically singled out by teachers and administrators for punishment and forced to endure hostile and discriminatory treatment simply because of their race," said Catherine Kim, staff attorney with the ACLU Racial Justice Project in a press release from the ACLU last week. "Such behavior is a vestige of a tragic past and is simply unacceptable in any contemporary American school setting."

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Alabama on behalf of nine parents of Monroeville Junior High School (MJHS) students, names as defendants the members of the Monroe County Board of Education, the superintendent of the Monroe County School District and the principal of MJHS. The ACLU and ACLU of Alabama ask the court to certify as a class all African American students who attended MJHS last year, who attend currently, and who will attend the school in the future, as well as their parents and guardians.

Some of the most egregious allegations in the lawsuit document the use of racial epithets and slurs made by teachers and school officials toward African American students. School officials refer to African American students as "niggers" and "filthy trash," and they have told African American parents that they would not be permitted to run the school "like

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