By RONALD SMOTHERS
Published: May 18, 1994
After a principal’s attempts to discourage interracial couples from attending the high school prom in Weedowee, Ala., the Justice Department today reopened a 24-year-old desegregation case and asked a Federal court to remove the principal.
In the action in Federal District Court in Montgomery, Ala., the Office of Civil Rights asked that the Randolph County School District be found in violation of a 1970 order barring the district from discriminating in its extracurricular activities, in its disciplinary practices and in its hiring of faculty and staff members.
But the new action also seeks the “termination or reassignment” of Hulond Humphries, the principal at Randolph County High School. Such a move against an individual school official is unusual for the Justice Department in desegregation cases.
Mr. Humphries touched off a brief school boycott and awakened racial antagonism in the community last February, when he threatened at a school assembly to cancel the prom to prevent interracial couples from attending. He publicly told a student who is the child of an interracial marriage that she was a “mistake.” Statements Criticized
“Mr. Humphries’s statements at the assembly created unnecessary and substantial racial discrimination in the conduct of extracurricular activities at the high school,” the Justice Department’s motion said.
The court action, filed on the 40th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court school desegregation case, asks that the school district, in which blacks make up 37 percent of the enrollment, explain why Mr. Humphries “should not be terminated or reassigned to duties that do not involve contact with or supervision of students.”
Nathaniel Douglas, head of the education opportunities section of the department’s civil rights division, confirmed the filing of the motions today and said that technically, the district was still covered by the the 1970 order against a variety of racially discriminatory activities.
The department’s recent investigation of the district at the request of black parents had found substantial problems with compliance with that order, Mr. Douglas said.
Dr. Audrey Clinton-Fisher, the education specialist in the Southeast regional office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, called the Justice Department action “a giant step toward eliminating the vestiges of discrimination in Randolph County.”