Sitting at the bar of a popular Newnan restaurant called the Rednexican, Warren Budd enjoyed a bowl of white chicken chili, convinced that the recent incident of an East Coweta High School student being photographed in a Ku Klux Klan hood and draped in a Confederate flag was more of a reflection of a misguided kid than the whole community.
“When I first saw it, I thought two things,” said Budd, who has lived in Coweta for 43 years. “I wondered where his parents were and what kind of influence they have. And the second thing is that this is just some kid acting like a teenager.”
Sitting a few stools down, Robert Burton was more blunt: “It was a dumb kid. Doing what dumb kids do.”
Near downtown, however, Kay Herd wasn’t so quick to pass the incident off as a harmless prank.
“There is a lot of prejudice down here. Look at that,” she said, pointing at the police cruiser easing down her block. “Look how they come up in our neighborhoods. Look how they treat us. That is what they think of us.”
Coweta County, about 30 miles from downtown Atlanta, started trending on social media Wednesday after a tweet from former East Coweta High School student Lorenzo Lewis went viral.
Lewis, who was not involved in the taking of the picture, said he forwarded the image, which appears to show one student wearing a Ku Klux Klan hood while holding a Confederate flag, left him “speechless.”
His tweet generated hundreds of retweets and likes, and several news outlets picked up the story.
On Thursday Coweta County school officials announced that they had identified the students involved in the photograph as two East Coweta High School students.
School spokesman Dean Jackson said the photo was taken Tuesday morning in the school parking lot.
Jackson declined to identify the students or describe the circumstances of the photograph, citing student privacy laws. He said that the incident was not related to a specific threat or to a school activity.
“Students are focused and going through a normal school day,” Jackson said.
In an open letter to parents, school principal Steve Allen said the school is continuing “to investigate the matter, and is implementing disciplinary consequences.”
Smokey Hinton, who has lived in Coweta for 54 years, has little faith that the school will do anything to the students.
“If you white and you got a certain name in this community, you can do whatever you want,” said Hinton, who is black. “I wasn’t surprised by any of this at all. Ain’t nothing going to be done. They just gonna laugh and pat those kids on the back.”
Down the street from the high school at Tony’s Barbershop in Sharpsburg, a steady stream of customers filed in for haircuts. Most knew about the incident, and those not familiar with social media were handed a copy of the local paper.
“I think it was all for him to get some attention,” said Taylor Vold, a barber and East Coweta High School graduate. “I don’t think it was a representation of what the community really is. He was just a dumb kid.”
“I don’t think the school was racially divided when I was there,” she said. “Did we have fights? Yes, but it was over boys. Nothing serious.”
Shop-owner Joseph Rubino, said while he was certain that the incident was a childish prank, he was surprised by the blatant racism of it.
“I have been here for 23 years and I have never seen or heard anything about the Ku Klux Klan down here,” Rubino said.
Chris Cobb, another barber, said while there is not an overriding sense of racism in Coweta that he has seen, there are hidden pockets.
“You are going to have that in any part of society,” Cobb said. “ I see Confederate flags, like you see everywhere else. I hear racist jokes. But that doesn’t mean we have a problem down here.”
“This is all overblown. This is not Ferguson. This is not Rodney King,” Cobb added. “That is not to say that those things don’t happen and what happened down here was terrible. But it was not normal. Kids are silly sometimes.”
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