A video confirmed to show several white students from two Hoover, Alabama, high schools using racial slurs and discussing how to get rid of Jews and black people hit social media over the weekend.
so this is how students at @SpainPark High School in Hoover, Alabama act? pic.twitter.com/CMOjCVJZlM
— MALLORY MOORE☆★☆ (@MMoorw) March 4, 2019
"Without the Holocaust, what would the world be like?" asks one partygoer in the video. "Jews would run the world."
"F**k n****rs, f**k Jews," another student can be heard saying.
However, a young woman objects, saying, "Jews are fine because they are white."
"Fine, we just need n****rs gone," says another woman in response.
"You stick them in concentration camps," says another, as the students cackle.
"No, you just have to wait until they die off," is the retort.
Hoover Superintendent Kathy Murphy confirmed to AL.com Monday that the students in the video are from Spain Park High School, saying she had been told so by Hoover and Spain Park principals in a conference call earlier that morning.
"We are exceptionally sad and disappointed that this would either be the attitude of some of our young people or whatever would prompt them to have such conversations," she said, noting that because the incident happened off campus, any disciplinary action that did result would have to focus on the "residual impact in the school itself."
Spain Park senior Unique Simpson, who is black, told Al.com she was "so sick and tired of going through this same routine" at her school, noting that multiple racial incidents at the school have been ill-handled, in her opinion, by administrators.
Hoover City Councilman Derrick Murphy, of no relation to the superintendent, told AL.com, "I am saddened by the words and thoughts of these children. There is no excuse for hate speech; or hate for that matter. This does not represent our city."
"As a parent," Councilman Murphy said, "I sincerely pray for all of the parents represented in the video — whether they are also struggling with the same hate or are simply blindsided by the children's thoughts. I have full confidence in school leadership on handling this situation."
The incident isn't the first time students from the Cotton State have found images of themselves on social media engaging in racially problematic activities. A picture from St. Clair County's Moody High School last September showed six white students standing with their boots on the back of a black student with the caption "we got us one," Sputnik reported. The line was widely held to be a reference to white lynch mobs, which once terrorized the state's African-American population.
Last June, a Birmingham church put up a message on its sign reading "Black folks need to stay out of white churches," although in that instance the message was from a black church aiming to circumvent gentrification in a historically black district of the city that its pastor believed was being driven by a new megachurch, Sputnik reported.
Hoover was also the city where Emantic Fitzgerald Bradford Jr. was killed by police on Thanksgiving night last year in a shopping mall. After it was revealed that Bradford, a former US Army soldier, wasn't the aggressor in the shooting incident to which police were responding, but rather a civilian trying to defend himself from the shooter, the Alabama NAACP condemned Bradford's killing as caused by racially biased policing.
