For decades, many things have divided Greene County.
Race, class, poverty and unequal access to education have been defining issues, all of which were outlined more than 60 years ago in a groundbreaking race study in the county, and whose lingering effects are still present today.
But now the region is riven by the uproar over a black high school teacher and the student who recorded that teacher's rant, in which he called the student "the dumbest girl" he'd ever met, and suggested she would only be good for having babies.
The family of 16-year-old Shaniaya Hunter had demanded that Cory Hunter (no relation) be fired from Greene County High School, where he was also the boys' varsity basketball coach.
Greene County School System Superintendent Chris Houston confirmed that Cory Hunter resigned in front of the Greene County Board of Education late Monday night.
“He will not be returning to the classroom,” Houston said in an email Tuesday. “In submitting his resignation, he verbally expressed his apologies to his students and fellow staff members for any disruption caused to the school by the controversy over the last several weeks.”
Ben Windham, an attorney for Shaniaya Hunter, had threatened to sue Cory Hunter and take the school system to court if the teacher didn't resign or get fired over the incident that unfolded three months ago.
“It is a shame that it took a lawyer to be involved,” Windham said. “It is a shame that it took this long. I am just glad for Shaniaya Hunter. She can go to school and hopefully move on.”
But the drama has put tiny Greene County, about 90 miles east of Atlanta, on the viral map and has been picked up by both traditional and social media, creating a whirlwind of debate.
‘People Who Look Like Us’
Last Friday, Reid’s Haircare was as busy as you would expect a salon to be going into the weekend. Vickie Cosby, the shop’s longtime owner, took a needed break from doing someone’s hair to weigh in on the controversy.
“I think we are getting a one-sided story and not hearing everything,” Cosby said. “It is a very unfortunate incident and I feel bad about it. But if they lose Cory, they will be losing a great teacher. I like Cory.”
In a nutshell, Cosby illustrated the word on the street: Cory Hunter seemed to have the community’s support.
“It certainly was wrong, but at the end of the day he should not be fired,” said Lillie Tripp, the pastor of Apostolic Faith Kingdom Life Fellowship Ministry in Hancock County. “His comments were wrong, but something had to (have) happen(ed) before she pressed record.”
But Katrina Breeding, a local attorney who was one of the first black students to integrate Greene County High School in the 1960s, isn’t buying it.
“I am trying to figure out a delicate way to say this. But for historical reasons, we as blacks feel compelled to support people who look like us because we have been denied so much. It goes back to slavery and being oppressed,” Breeding said. “But he needed to be fired and it should have happened sooner. If not for social media, the press and the attorney, it would not have happened.”
Knowing ‘Who To Mistreat’
Several people who know Cory Hunter as a teacher acknowledge — and this was confirmed by Shaniaya Hunter — that at the beginning of each school year, he makes a peculiar announcement: “He says, ‘I like to joke, so if you can’t handle that, get out,’” Cosby said.
So in early December, Shaniaya sat in Cory Hunter’s U.S. History class recording a lecture on slavery and abolition on her iPad.
On the four-minute recording Cory Hunter mentions Sojourner Truth, and Shaniaya can be heard asking, “Who?”
“You know what?” Cory Hunter replies. “You might be the dumbest girl I’ve ever met in my life, and I have been around for 37 years and clearly you are the dumbest girl that I have ever met.”
He continues as students laugh in the background: “You know what your purpose gonna be? To have sex and have children because you ain’t never gonna be smart.”
Since the incident Shaniaya Hunter has sporadically attended school because she had surgery in January to fix a detached retina in one eye and retinal holes in the other. But she said her attendance was also affected by being bullied.
“Everybody knows who to say something to and who to mistreat,” Breeding said. “He knew that he could get away with talking to a student that way. That tells me the administration was neglectful. The administration should know what type of teachers they have and teachers should know their peers.”
Shaniaya Hunter could not be reached Tuesday about her plans to go back to school.
‘Where Is The Progress?’
In 1944, Gunnar Myrdal, a Swedish economist, published “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” a lengthy look at race relations in America.
As part of his research to challenge white America to do better by the nation’s 13 million black citizens, Myrdal visited Greene County in 1939.
Aside from the standard forms of degradation that blacks endured in the 1930s and 1940s, Myrdal found a Greene County so racially codified that black schoolchildren were not permitted to use an abandoned school near a cemetery because county officials feared barefoot black kids might walk over white graves.
Years later, whites in Greene County ignored the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision that found state-sanctioned segregation in public schools to be unconstitutional. It wasn’t until 1969 — amid threats that the district would lose federal funds — that the school board adopted a full integration plan.
But on the same day of that 1969 vote, the board deeded a public school building to the city of Siloam, whose mayor promptly signed it over to a group of white parents to start their own private “academy.”
Katrina Breeding, the local attorney, was one of the black students who integrated Greene County High School before the 1969 agreement, graduating in 1970.
She said in many ways, she sees herself in Shaniaya Hunter.
“I remember walking down the hall and being called the N-word,” Breeding said. “That was more than 40 years ago. That young lady is going to remember this for the rest of her life. She will look back at her high school days and remember how she was humiliated before her peers by someone in charge of nurturing her.”
Breeding pauses before recounting how she would sit at a lunch table and watch all of the white students leave. And the time her father finally gave her permission to fight back.
“But you know what?” Breeding said. “A teacher never called me (the N-word). It was always other students. So here you have a student today, being called by a teacher, and a black one at that, that she is dumb. Where is the progress?”
‘Blown Out Of Proportion’
Back at the hair salon, someone notes that more than a third of Greene County’s black residents live under the federal poverty line and that the area’s unemployment rate is among the highest in the state.
Those are reasons why some in the county believe Cory Hunter should not lose his job.
Lillie Tripp, the apostolic pastor, who lives in the southwestern end of the county in the affluent and sprawling Reynolds Plantation community, said Cory Hunter’s words were “hurtful” but came from a place that nobody knows but the teacher and student.
“Why did he say it? What was the conversation before, and why did he go there?” she asked. “It is out of his character based on how Cory was raised. His father is a pastor and his mother a teacher. He made those comments not knowing he was being recorded. I think it is being blown out of proportion. I am sure he feels remorseful.”
About the Author
