Parents of two former Saint Francis High School students have filed a $20 million lawsuit against the Mountain View private Catholic school, claiming that their sons were wrongly accused of wearing blackface in photos and that they were simply wearing face masks to treat acne.
Saint Francis is accused of upsetting the lives of the two adolescents by wrongly pointing to the photo as another uproar erupted over students uploading offensive pictures to Instagram, according to the complaint, which the parents filed in August 2020. It also named defendants as President Jason Curtis and Alicia Labana, a Saint Francis student parent.
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According to court records, attorneys for Saint Francis, Curtis, and Labana refuted the charges and failed to respond to comments on the complaint immediately.
The two teens are identified in the lawsuit by their initials, A.H. and H.H.
The 14-year-old boys said in a statement, "This case is our effort to reclaim our identities and reputations and to correct the record of what occurred - three and a half years ago, we only attempted acne face masks to correct teenage acne before we began high school."
The blackface photo incident leads to a lawsuit against the private school
According to the complaint, in 2017, A.H. and a minor applied white-colored acne face masks and photographed themselves. The next day, H.H. joined, and the three teenagers shared a picture wearing face masks that were light green when they were wet but turned dark green when they dried. The three shirtless teenagers are seen posing together in the photo, as included in the complaint, wearing what the suit says are green face masks.
According to the complaint, A.H. and H.H. were unaware that their friend had posted the photo online. It was Minor III who sent the picture to a mate, who later "tagged a music playlist on her Spotify account with a copy of the photograph."
Protests erupted three years later, after current and former Saint Francis students were linked to an Instagram account that posted a racist image mocking George Floyd, the man killed by a Minneapolis police officer in May 2020.
During the height of national civil unrest, a pupil at the same Catholic private school got a copy of the blackface photo and shared it online and named those in the image and suggested that they were in blackface, so obscurely and grossly misrepresented.
Other St. Francis students and parents were outraged by the picture, prompting Jason Curtis, the school's president, to condemn it publicly.
The picture "had absolutely nothing to do with these horrific acts of racism," according to the complaint, and the school disciplined the boys "to advance a political agenda."
The boys were informed they had to withdraw or risk immediate expulsion without an inquiry about the picture or intervention from the school's Review Board. In June of 2020, the boys left the school.
Now, they're suing for emotional and financial damages, as well as $140,000 in combined tuition reimbursement. According to the families, Saint Francis would tell prospective schools that the boys had left because of a "disciplinary condition" that supposedly interfered with H.H.'s ability to play football and lacrosse.
H.H. has since moved out of state to engage in athletics, with his mother and father living with him on a rotating basis. Meanwhile, A.H. and his parents relocated three hours north, and he is currently pursuing his high school education online.
