With Victory Over School Board on Gadsden Flag Patch, Seventh-Grader Teaches Americans a Lesson in Free Speech

A seventh grader, Jaiden Rodriguez, is returning to class with the Gadsden Flag on his backpack. By forcing Colorado’s Vanguard Secondary School to retreat from demands that he remove it, he’s defending an American symbol and living its motto: “Don’t Tread on Me.”Yesterday in the Sun, I wrote about a video that the president of the Libertas Institute, Connor Boyack, had tweeted that morning. It showed Jaiden’s parents meeting with an assistant school counselor, Nicole Longhoffer, who had removed the boy from class, saying that the Gadsden Flag couldn’t be “around other kids.”In the video, which has racked up over 10.3 million views since its posting, Ms. Longhoffer can be heard claiming that the Gadsden Flag has “origins of slavery and slave trade” and repeating a demand that Jaiden to “take his stuff out of his bag and go back to class.”Vanguard’s operations director, Jeff Yocum, called the Gadsden Flag patch “disruptive to the classroom environment,” claiming it was “tied to the Confederate flag and other white-supremacy groups.”Jaiden’s parents didn’t accept the dark meaning that Vanguard inferred for the Gadsden Flag, unwilling to surrender one of America’s earliest symbols of unity to divisive forces of the left and right who have sought to co-opt it throughout history.Debunking Vanguard’s interpretation of the “Revolutionary War patch,” Jaiden’s mother suggested it was a mistake to conflate it with the Confederacy or slaveholding. She then asked to see where in school policy the iconic yellow was banned, because no such policy existed.Jaiden’s mother then pointed to the ACLU website which includes a page on Tinker v. Des Moines, a 1969 Supreme Court ruling that “cemented students’ rights to free speech in public schools,” backing a junior highschooler’s right to wear a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.Support for Jaiden cut across the usual political dividing lines. The Democratic governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, tweeted that the Gadsden Flag is “a proud symbol” and an “iconic warning to Britain or any government not to violate the liberties of Americans.”A Republican candidate for president, Vivek Ramaswamy, tweeted “the idea that the Gadsden Flag is rooted in racism is beyond ridiculous,” calling it “a warning to King George and Britain not to violate the liberties of American colonists.”Mr. Ramaswamy said the flag is “not a racist symbol,” citing a 2016 ruling by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission that it “originated in the Revolutionary War in a non-racial context.”This bipartisan support was a throwback to the flag’s inspiration, the famous “Join or Die” cartoon of 1775. Published in the Pennsylvania Gazette, the illustration of a timber rattler — native to North America — urged unity against all enemies of liberty.Credited to Benjamin Franklin, “Join or Die” showed the snake divided into sections for each of the thirteen colonies. Its message was, as Franklin said after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans “must all hang together, or we will certainly hang separately.”A South Carolina delegate to the Continental Congress, Christopher Gadsden, took inspiration from “Join or Die” in 1775, creating the flag. In the 250 years since, it has been used by groups left and right, radical and mainstream, but the yellow banner belongs to all Americans as part of our shared national heritage.In the face of this blowback, the Vanguard School Board called an emergency meeting and put out a statement saying truths that Americans hold self-evident. They support “our Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the ordered liberty that all Americans have enjoyed…”The letter recognized “the historical significance of the Gadsden Flag and its place in history” and said the “incident is an occasion for us to reaffirm our deep commitment to a classical education in support of these American principles.”Vanguard and the school district, the letter concluded, had informed Jaiden’s family “that he may attend school with the Gadsden Flag patch visible on his backpack.” The young student still has years of learning ahead, but by refusing to be tread upon, he has taught the nation a history lesson that no textbook ever could.

With Victory Over School Board on Gadsden Flag Patch, Seventh-Grader Teaches Americans a Lesson in Free Speech

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