Federal judge halts ISD’s dreadlocks rule
A federal judge has halted a Houston-area school district from enforcing a dress code policy that would require a Black teen to cut his dreadlocks.
U.S. District Judge George C. Hanks Jr. in Houston this week granted a preliminary injunction to Kaden Bradford, a rising junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu. He and his cousin, De’Andre Arnold, drew nationwide attention when they received in-school suspension for refusing to cut their hair, in defiance of the school policy.
The students’ parents ultimately withdrew them from the Barbers Hill Independent School District and enrolled them in the Goose Creek Consolidated Independent School District, from which Arnold graduated. Bradford is returning to the Barbers Hill ISD for his junior year on Friday.
“I’m feeling relieved. I’m so excited that the judge ruled in our favor,” Bradford, 16, said in an interview Wednesday. “I’ve been in the lowest place that I’ve been in my entire life.”
Although the injunction will enable Bradford to return to Barbers Hill High School, the case remains in its early stages as lawyers proceed with a suit filed in May against the district, its Board of Trustees and several individual defendants, said Michaele N. Turnage Young, senior counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund and one of the lawyers representing the young men.
“Every student deserves a fair shot at a great education,” Young
said. “We hope to have the court make clear that a hair and grooming policy that makes it impossible for students to wear ‘locs’ or wear their hair in culturally significant ways is in fact a form of racial discrimination that violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and our Constitution.”
Growing up with Trinidadian culture, Bradford decided to start forming his locs around the time he was in the seventh grade, he said. Initially his friends noted the style was different but told him that his hair looked nice, and no one bothered him about it.
But when he entered Barbers Hill High School as a freshman, the school had a dress code that applied to male students mandating that hair “not extend, at any time, below the eyebrows, below the ear lobes, or below the top of a T-shirt collar. Corn rows and/or dread locks are permitted if they meet the aforementioned lengths,” according to court documents.
To comply with the rule, Bradford wore a headband and tied his hair back and up so it would not extend below his earlobes, neck or eyebrows. According to court documents, though, Bradford was frequently scrutinized, getting pulled aside by the school’s assistant principal at least once a week during his freshman year to check if his hair met the protocol.
The supervision continued into his sophomore year when school officials gave Bradford verbal warnings about his hair length, though he was always found to be in compliance with the dress code.
Then in December, halfway through his sophomore year, officials at the predominantly white district with about 5,400 students changed the dress code to say a male student’s hair could not “extend below the top of a Tshirt collar or be gathered or worn in a style that would allow the hair to extend below the top of a T-shirt collar, below the eyebrows, or below the ear lobes when let down.”
The case attracted national attention, with Arnold being interviewed on Ellen DeGeneres’ TV show and invited to attend the 92nd Annual Academy Awards show by a celebrity couple who produced an Oscar-nominated short film about a Black father learning to style his daughter’s hair.
Neither Superintendent Greg Poole, a defendant in the suit, nor a district spokesperson responded to a request for comment Wednesday.
“People want to call us racist, but we’re following the rules, the law of the land,” Poole told CNN earlier this year. “We’re certainly not making this up.”
The district’s Board of Trustees voted in July not to change the policy, according to lawyers representing Bradford and Arnold.
Bradford eventually transferred in early 2020 to Sterling High School to complete the remainder of his sophomore year. The months that followed were filled with difficult days — “my bad days,” as Bradford considers them — where he could not find a desire to roll out of bed.
“I would shut everyone out, basically,” he said. “I felt that I was almost targeted. I was like thinking to myself, ‘Why out of all the thousands of kids that go to this school, why am I being called out for something like my hair?’”
“Most days I was so worried about ‘Am I going to be able to go back to school or am I going to have to move?’” he said.
His mother, Cindy, would walk into his bedroom and try to encourage him.
“You can’t give up, Kaden,” she recalled telling him. “Everything is going to work out, Kaden.”
Young said hair discrimination is often hidden behind policies such as the one at Barbers Hill, located 35 miles east of downtown Houston. When looking at how schools enforce the policies, she said, it becomes apparent that they disproportionately affect Black students.
“That’s completely unacceptable,” Young said. “It deprives those students of the opportunity to learn.”
With a court ruling in his favor, Bradford said he is looking forward to returning to class with the friends he’s grown up with and restarting his education. He is also eager to resume playing trombone in the school band, which he considers “almost like a second family.”
His hair now extends to his shoulders and he has no plans to cut it.
“I’m hopeful that the policy will be changed for future African American students — or any students,” he said.