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Racist Hats and Drums?
Students at Covington Catholic High School, an all-male Catholic high school in Park Hills, Kentucky, came under fire when they attended an anti-abortion march for Life rally at the Lincoln memorial in Washington, DC, in January of 2019.
Going on at the same time was an indigenous peoples march in which a Native American man, Nathan Phillips, was playing a traditional song on a drum. Phillips claimed that the Holy Cross students were racist for wearing MAGA (Make America Great Again — at that time the slogan of republican President Donald trump) hats while they “swarmed” him and blocked his exit. One of the students, Nicolas Sandmann, faced Phillips as he sang and played a drum. Sandmann smiled and stood motionless through much of this and claimed that he was trying to calm the situation by staying still. However, news media told another story — that Sandmann and his fellow students were deliberately wearing their MAGA hats to advance their political agenda and were harassing nathan Philips.
Many news stories and posts brought this encounter to national attention. Some students received death threats and many were maligned online for their perceived harassment of the Native American man. Video footage showed that Phillips himself was the one who had approached the Covington students that he had claimed swarmed him. Nicholas Sandmann sued the Washington Post for $250 million, claiming that the paper falsely labeled him a racist and that the paper had targeted and bullied him. The lawsuit was dismissed by a federal judge mainly because, even though the Post only reported Phillips’s opinion that he had been blocked, the First amendment protection of the press protected their right to report the incident from Phillips’s perspective, even if some facts may have been erroneous (Fox, 2019 ).