A North Carolina middle school teacher is taking the matter of his termination to court after filing a lawsuit claiming his firing resulted from white parents’ complaints over the teaching of one book during Black History Month.
Markayle Gray was a seventh and eighth-grade teacher at Charlotte Secondary School. He claims he was fired by the school principal after the school faced backlash for his teaching of the book “Dear Martin,” a novel about a Black teenager’s struggle to grasp racial injustice after being racially profiled by law enforcement, according to the lawsuit obtained by Atlanta Black Star.
He assigned the book to his seventh-grade honors students in January 2023 ahead of the class’s Black History Month activities, the lawsuit states. The book had already been approved by school administrators and the school’s principal, Keisha Rock, who had reportedly recommended the book to Gray.
Upon learning of the book assignment, an unknown number of white parents complained that the novel “injected unwelcome political views on systemic racial inequality into their children’s classroom,” Gray’s lawyers stated in a press release.
An official complaint was also submitted to the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction about critical race theory instruction at the school. State lawmakers passed a bill just this year restricting instruction over certain racial topics in school classrooms that make students feel guilty or responsible for past actions committed by people of the same race or sex.
The suit states that Rock sought to avoid more pressure by removing Gray from his position. Gray was subsequently fired on Feb. 2, 2023, in the middle of the school year. He was hired just four months prior to his firing in October 2022.
Now, Gray is suing the school and its board of directors who authorized his immediate termination, according to the lawsuit.
The board has a corrective action protocol in place for…
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