On the weekend of a national holiday in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. and his teachings, it was a group of white boys from an overwhelmingly white Catholic school in a 90-percent-white county in Kentucky who got the nation talking about broad themes in racism. The teen most infamously involved in that scene, high school junior Nick Sandmann, hired a crisis management firm to pull him and his peers out of the deep end. He released a statement pointing to several black men who identified themselves as Hebrew Israelites and the Native American man, Nathan Phillips, as the real aggressors. The backpedaling, too, would be short-lived, as new allegations of racism and intolerance from Covington Catholic students quickly surfaced. And on Monday, new denials were issued as (now deleted) videos dating back to 2011 surfaced featuring white Covington Catholic students appearing in blackface at their basketball games.

Source: Huffington Post January 22, 2019 18:53 UTC