High School Coach Fired For Watermelon Ritual To Be Reinstated


A football coach at a South Carolina high school was dismissed from his job this week after complaints that a watermelon ritual his team performed after winning was a racist attack. However, the coach was offered his job back at Charleston’s Academic Magnet High School on Wednesday after agreeing to undergo diversity and sensitivity training.

According to CNN, the team developed a ritual. They would draw a face on a watermelon, and give the watermelon a name. While the first watermelon used in the ritual was named “Junior,” all five subsequent ones appear to have been named Bonds Wilson. (Bonds Wilson was once the name of the predominantly black school in the area, according to Voices of Black America. It was an Equalization School, one of many built to avoid desegregation. After it was demolished, the Academic Magnet school was built in its place, and the campus is called the Bonds-Wilson campus.)

After winning, the team would smash (rather than cut) the watermelon, and eat it. While two students smashed the watermelon, the team made sounds the school superintendent calls “tribal-like chanting,” but a parent from an opposing team described as “monkey sounds.”

It was this parent who first reported the watermelon ritual to the school board, which then investigated.

A debate raged over the watermelon ritual, with some arguing that it was called racist only because it involved a watermelon, and many calling the claim of “monkey noises” unsubstantiated and suggesting the offense had more to do with a loss than a watermelon.

However, parents say that the school board interviewed students extensively about the exact nature of the watermelon ritual, and came to a conclusion that included ending the celebration, and terminating Coach Bud Walpole’s employment.

A petition circulated, garnering well over 4,000 signatures. Parents signing it stated that their children never knew of any connection between watermelon and racism (though the stereotype has not passed out of current use) until the school taught it to them in the process of their investigation, and calling the coach’s termination a racist act itself.

In addition to maintaining that there were no intentional racist overtones to the watermelon ritual, parents complain about the way students were questioned, being pulled out of class with no notice to parents beforehand. While it isn’t unusual for a principal to question students about an issue without parents present, many claim that they were pressured into giving the answers they felt were expected.

Whatever students and coach thought when carrying out the watermelon smashes, the pressure on the school board was successful. Coach Walpole was offered reinstatement to his job only two days after his termination, on the condition that he agree to diversity and sensitivity training, WBTV reports.

[photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/morjazzy/2891917969/”>morgan childers</a>]

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