GEORGIA: KKK Lawyer Representing Georgia Officer Fired For Flying Confederate Flag
Roswell, Ga. — A law firm co-founded by a man with a lengthy history of representing groups like the Ku Klux Klan and other white nationalist and net-confederate organizations has filed a lawsuit on behalf of a former Georgia police officer who claims she was fired for flying a Confederate flag in front of her house earlier this year.
Silvia Cotriss, a former sergeant with the Roswell Police Department, claims she was fired in July “following an internal investigation that found her conduct unbecoming in displaying a Confederate flag displayed in her front yard in a neighboring town,” according to her attorneys at the Southern Legal Resource Center. That firm was co-founded by Kirk Lyons, who is serving as co-counsel in the case and has represented several white nationalists dating back to the 1980s. The Southern Poverty Law Center considers Lyons’ firm to be the “legal arm of the neo-Confederate movement.”
In an interview with Vocativ in 2015, Lyons discussed representing groups like the Klan and its members, but said he hasn’t taken on those types of cases in several years. And while he’s represented these types of groups personally, he said his firm had not. He said that some “extreme things” he’s said in the past is what caused the SPLC to brand him a racist.
“They don’t tell you that my best friend of 17 years is H.K. Edgerton,” he said. Edgerton is an African-American member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a neo-Confederate group, and a former NAACP chapter president. He also serves on the board of Lyons’ Southern Legal Resource Center. “How many white supremacists do you know who have a black best friend?” Lyons added.
According to the lawsuit, the investigation into former Sergeant Cotriss determined that the flag was flying as a Roswell police cruiser was parked in her driveway — a claim she disputes.
“Not possible,” she said, “as the vehicle had been returned to the Roswell PD motor pool well before the complainant saw the flags in my yard.” She claims that she flies the flag as a way to “honor her Southern heritage and her late husband.”
“This sort of high handed politically correct firing by the City of Roswell sets a horrible precedent and endangers the employment and constitutional rights of government employers across the State of Georgia,” said one of her attorneys, David Ates. “Which is why prosecution of this lawsuit must go forward!” added Lyons.
Lyons’ history with white supremacist groups goes back decades, when a Klansman who served as the “ambassador-at-large” for the Aryan Nations asked him in 1985 to represent him and other white supremacist leaders in a highly publicized sedition trial, according to the SPLC’s file on Lyons. He ended up winning the case for the Klansman and became a “celebrity on the radical right.”
Lyons denied to Vocativ any current association to white supremacist groups. But he has maintained ties to groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, which has a complex history with hate groups. The group initially was founded after the Civil War for descendants of Confederate soldiers killed during the war. It was organized “to encourage the preservation of history, perpetuate the hallowed memories of brave men.” Each year it holds a Confederate summer camp for kids, which Lyons has helped organize and run for the last several years — despite his place on the SPLC’s list of racist extremists (which doesn’t come without flaws.)
According to the SPLC, Lyons is a former member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization founded by William Pierce, the author of the Turner Diaries, a fictional blueprint for starting a race war and something of a bible for hate groups since it was published in 1978. Pages of Pierce’s novel were found in the getaway car driven by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in 1995. Lyons denies that he was ever a member of the Alliance, though Pierce has referenced him as such.
Lyons’ own words tend to echo the revolutionary themes in Pierce’s novel. In a speech in 2000 to American Friends of the British National Party, Lyons explained the sort of movement he was hoping to lead. “The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution,” he said in the speech. “We seek nothing more than a return to a godly, stable, tradition-based society with no ‘Northernisms’ attached, a hierarchical society, a majority European-derived country.”
In 2003, an SCV internal email was uncovered in which Lyons argues that members of the KKK should be allowed into the organization. According to the SPLC, the discovery of the email “set off a struggle over the SCV [over whether to allow the organization to radicalize] that continues to this day, [and] that has led to the loss of thousands of members, and badly damaged the group’s reputation.”
His role in the lawsuit, he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, is to make sure Cotriss “gets a fair shake after being unfairly terminated.”
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ARIZONA: High School Bans Flag Flying, Calls Actions ‘Disruptive’
Marana High School has banned the Confederate flag from campus, saying its display by a group of students has become a disruption and creates an unwelcoming environment for classmates and staff of color.
The group of students — who have been flying the flags from their vehicles for more than a year — said it represents pride in their Southern heritage and the ban oppresses their right to free speech. But for many in America, the flag is a symbol of racism, white supremacy and slavery.
The northwest-side school has been receiving an increased number of complaints about the flag from students and parents in the past month, Tamara Crawley, a Marana district spokeswoman, said. As a result, the school banned the flag from being flown or displayed on campus. The flag can still be used for educational purposes, school leaders have said.
While the protesting students argue that they’d never harassed anyone, school administration and several students and parents said the flag was being used to create a racially charged and aggressive school climate.
“This isn’t about a particular object,” Crawley said. “It’s about ensuring that everybody is safe and comfortable.”
Just before the first bell rang at Marana High on Tuesday morning, a group of teens gathered around a pickup truck parked across the street from the school.
They were hanging out across the street and not on school property, at 12000 W. Emigh Road, because of the flag ban. Flying it from the other side of the road — while parked on private property — is a form of civil disobedience, said one of the students, Jesse Lagois, 17.
“We’re actually fighting for our rights to express ourselves,” he said.
Lagois was leaning against the truck, from which the Confederate flag flapped in the wind. The light-blue GMC also had the word, “redneck” written on the tailgate. The word, the senior said, represents a life of blue-collar workers, country folk and back roads.
To Lagois and a small number of classmates, the flag does not symbolize racism. “It’s heritage. It’s everything that the South stood for,” he said.
The school has about 2,000 students and is 60 percent white.
Alexis Kring, 16, said she wants to raise awareness of what she considers the real values the Confederate flag represents. The symbols and designs on the flag represent the blood of Christ, protection of God, a Christian cross and the 13 Southern states, the sophomore said.
“We’re not standing for the wrong reasons,” she said. The message of the Confederate flag, to her and the group, is “through the blood of Christ, the 13 states are united in a Christian fight.”
But for Mariah Barnett, a senior who is half African-American, the flag has a different message: one of hatred and separation.
Barnett said she’s dealt with racism on campus — subtle or otherwise — throughout her time at Marana High.
But it’s gotten really bad in the past year or so, she said; she’s seen more Confederate flags and sometimes heard people saying racial slurs or chanting negative or derogatory things about people of color.
She reckons the heightened racial tension might have something to do with 2016 being an election year, but no matter the reason, she said she feels scared to walk from the school building to her car in the parking lot.
“It’s kind of hard to explain with words,” she said. “I feel threatened. I feel hurt and frustrated.”
Her parents, Stacey and Cynthia Barnett, are just a few of the people who voiced concerns to the school. They say they’ve seen the flag being worn as capes by Marana High students and heard racial slurs being thrown around casually.
“We don’t always feel safe sending her to school because we don’t know what might happen,” Cynthia Barnett said. “We’re not sure how far someone is willing to take that fight.”
Stacey Barnett said he’s heard the heritage argument before, but he says that doesn’t change the fact that the Confederate flag was brought back after the Civil War as a scare tactic and symbol of hatred against black people.
They’ve spoken to the principal, and he’s taken the issue seriously. But they also understand that the issue is a sensitive one. What they want, they said, is for the kids who feel proud of their Confederate flag to have more empathy.
“Maybe it’s something you feel is fine, but if you know it hurts somebody else, where is your empathy?” Cynthia Barnett said.
Another parent, Cindy Perez, whose son is a senior at Marana High, said her son began to feel like “a nobody” as a result of what he felt was a racist and intimidating atmosphere at the school.
He felt as though the school was allowing it to go on, though Perez said she tried to explain to him that it might be a difficult thing to change.
David Mandel, the school’s principal, wrote in a letter to parents that while he wasn’t passing judgment on either side, the school has a responsibility to do what is in the best interest of protecting student safety and the well-being of all students, and it sought legal counsel in doing so.
The Confederate flag was a “reasonable barrier to feelings of safety and sense of well-being for a large number of students and staff,” he wrote.
Lagois and his friends say they’d never hurt or harass anyone, nor did any student ever come up to them to contest the flag, though he says he’s had soda and food thrown at him. They just want to be able to express their pride in their Southern heritage, he said.
At least 30 people at the school have expressed support, he said. A Facebook page, called “Parents Standing Up for Students Rights,” features an image with two pickup trucks flying Confederate flags with the message, “You ain’t stopping us.”
Jose Mendez, 17, who was part of the group hanging out by the pickup across the street from the school, said their values must be accepted the same way they’re expected to accept values they don’t agree with.
“We just want to be able to show our values,” he said.
Two seniors coming to school Tuesday morning said they don’t object to flying the Confederate flag on campus, as long as it’s not disruptive. But it kind of was, said Zak DeMars and Kyle William.
Students have been walking up and down the road waving the flag at oncoming cars and pedestrians, they said.
“They were flashing,” William said. “Just flying it is fine.”
