Video courtesy of senior Tharun Kannan
Principal Henry Turner promised to work with students and faculty to move the community forwards following the waving of a Confederate flag by North students on Tiger Drive Monday.
The incident involved two North students waving a Confederate flag while circling around Tiger Drive three times, according to senior Tharun Kannan, who shot video of it. The video was shared on Facebook and has been viewed over twenty thousand times as of Friday afternoon.
“I was sitting in the Tigers Loft. He pulls down Tiger Drive. As he gets closer to the school, his friend pulls out the flag,” said Kannan, who posted the video on his Facebook wall. It has since been shared by major Facebook pages, including an anti-racism page from Brookline and Black Lives Matter Cambridge.
Turner was quick to condemn the incident saying that it displayed “behaviors that are not part of our mission and values of school.”
According to Kannan, a dean asked him to remove the video from his wall to protect the identity of the flag-wavers. “I plan to keep it up,” said Kannan.
Turner said that the request was made so the students involved in the act are “not targeted and identified. We are concerned about their safety,” he said.
“I look forward to working with our students and staff in working to repair and move forwards from this incident,” he added in a letter sent out to the North community on Wednesday,
Turner also met with members of the Leadership in a Diverse Society class Tuesday morning to discuss the incident and brainstorm school-wide responses to it.
“I asked them about the challenge of seeing if they can develop ways to positively respond to this act. They had a really rich discussion. We are in the works of planning some ideas around that,” he said.