The NAACP and county students' lawsuit against the Shenandoah County School Board for reinstating Confederate names on two schools is set to go to trial next month. In motions filed last week, both sides are trying to limit each others' expert witness testimony. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
In September, a federal judge ruled the school board had violated the student plaintiffs' First Amendment rights, as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, by compelling speech in support of Stonewall Jackson through participation in extracurriculars at Stonewall Jackson High School. But the plaintiffs' other claims – that the reinstatement of both school names violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act – are still headed for trial in mid-December.
Last week, both parties filed motions attempting to limit what evidence or arguments the other side can use. For example, the school board argued that the plaintiffs' expert witness, Brig. Gen. Ty Seidule, a professor emeritus of history at West Point, shouldn't be able to argue that restoring the original school names was "cruel" to Black students – as the intent behind that decision is outside of his scope as a historian. They also argued that Dr. Adiaha Spinks-Franklin, a developmental behavioral pediatrician who has researched the impact of racism on child development, shouldn't say the students are experiencing cultural or internalized racism, since she didn't evaluate them personally.
The plaintiffs moved to entirely disqualify two of the school board's expert witnesses. One of them is Wanjiru Njoya. According to the European Center of Austrian Economics Foundation, she's a legal scholar, originally from Kenya, who earned her doctorate from Cambridge University and is now a research fellow at the Mises Institute, an economics think tank in Alabama.
The plaintiffs wrote, "Dr. Njoya is a fervent advocate for the Confederate cause who cannot, and does not, maintain objectivity in her opinions." They cited her published writings and several recent social media posts. In one, she references violence perpetrated by the Ku Klux Klan with the comment, "Oh, poor blacks! I'm sure they didn't do nothing." In another, she calls Winsome Earle-Sears a "phony" from Jamaica with "no respect for Confederate heritage." Another says "Thurmond/Wallace 2028," accompanied by photos of Strom Thurmond and George Wallace, two white southern politicians who were vocal supporters of segregation in the 1950s and 60s.
WMRA reached out to Njoya via email and has not heard back yet.
