Black Lives Matter, others rally in response to Spring Valley SRO incident

The Black Lives Matter and Black Educators for Justice groups staged a small rally on the S.C. State House grounds on Saturday in reaction to Monday’s altercation involving a white school resource officer and a black female student at Spring Valley High School.

Several dozen people had gathered by mid-afternoon, many of them holding signs calling for justice for the two girls involved. The groups and other individuals rallied both for the young woman who was videoed being thrown to the ground and slung across the room by former Richland County Sheriff’s deputy Ben Fields and for a second student, Niya Kenny, who has said she encouraged classmates to video the confrontation on their cell phones.

Both students were arrested and charged with disturbing schools. Fields was fired Wednesday by Sheriff Leon Lott. Richland School District 2 announced Saturday that the school administrator who invited Fields into the classroom was on paid leave and that the girls could return to school.

The FBI and the U.S. Justice Department have opened a civil rights investigation.

“It’s clear to me that the way in which that deputy sheriff SRO chose to handle the situation constitutes assault at the very least, and his termination by Leon Lott is inadequate,” said Kanika Ajanaku, of Columbia. “Had the student been a so-called white girl or Euro-American child, that SRO deputy sheriff would never, never have reacted in the fashion that he did.”

For Julia Dawson, a teacher at a Columbia-area school, what she saw of the Spring Valley incident disturbed her as an issue of human rights, she said.

“As a teacher and a human being, I have to come when I see the human rights and the humanity of anyone being assaulted,” Dawson said. “I’m here because I believe that we can have discipline in schools and learning environments that are free of any form of dehumanization.”

This story was originally published October 31, 2015 at 4:35 PM with the headline "Black Lives Matter, others rally in response to Spring Valley SRO incident."