Appellate court reinstates lawsuit against Lakeville school district over Black Lives Matter posters

Nick Woltman, Pioneer Press
·2 min read

A federal appeals panel on Wednesday reversed a lower court’s dismissal of a case against Lakeville Area Schools over the display of Black Lives Matter posters on its campuses.

The lawsuit was filed two years ago by a group of local taxpayers, parents and students who alleged their First Amendment rights were violated when the school district allowed posters featuring the slogan to be placed in classrooms, while refusing to permit the display of posters that read “All Lives Matter” or “Blue Lives Matter.”

In dismissing the suit last summer, U.S. District Judge Jerry Blackwell ruled that because district officials oversaw the design of the posters, they constituted government speech and were therefore not subject to challenges under the First Amendment.

The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals disagreed, writing that because the decision to display the posters was left up to individual teachers, they could not be considered government speech.

“Government speech requires that a government shape and control the expression,” the three-judge panel wrote in Wednesday’s ruling.

In allowing teachers to decide whether to hang the posters in their classrooms, the district “created a limited public forum, thereby opening school walls to the discussion of similar topics,” they added.

The appellate panel sent the case back to the U.S. District Court in Minnesota for further proceedings.

The Upper Midwest Law Center, a conservative nonprofit law firm that represents the plaintiffs in the case, praised the appellate court’s decision in a news release.

“This is a huge victory for free speech and a serious blow to government efforts to pass off private activist speech as its own,” UMLC senior counsel James Dickey said in the news release. “The government cannot put its thumb on the scale in favor of Black Lives Matter activists against all other speech on issues of race in America. If Minnesota’s school districts are going to open up their hallways and classrooms to private speech, they must do so without discrimination, or not do it.”

Lakeville Area Schools officials and their attorneys did not return messages seeking comment.

Also in Wednesday’s decision, the appellate court upheld Blackwell’s ruling that plaintiffs in the case must be identified by their legal names, rather than by pseudonyms.

Several of the suit’s plaintiffs signed onto the case without naming themselves, arguing that they feared “reprisal from political activists” as a result of their participation.

The appeals panel agreed with Blackwell that “a general reference to cancel culture alone is insufficient to establish a compelling fear of retaliation.”

Dickey said it is unclear whether those plaintiffs will continue to participate in the suit.

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