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WHITE TEACHERS ACCUSED OF SEX WITH BLACK BOYS: Town’s African American residents see racial double standard after women are freed on bail.
*Old racial wounds have been ripped opened in Laurens County. South Carolina following the arrest of two white female high school teachers accused of having sex with six of their male students – all of whom are black.
The fact that both women were allowed to remain free on bail has angered the town’s black community, who say the cases reflect the way crimes by whites against blacks in the segregated South were treated less seriously than other offenses, and blacks who leveled accusations against whites were less likely to be believed.
"If this had been black teachers, they would not be out of jail right now," Corinnie Young, a 49-year-old bookstore employee who is black, told the Associated Press.
"I can assure you if it were an African-American male who committed such an offense against a white female, history shows us that the charges, the punishment and the sentencing would be totally different," said state National Association for the Advancement of Colored People president Lonnie Randolph. "The system ain't blind when the perpetrator is an African American male or female or when the victim is a white female."
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Wendie Schweikert & Allenna Ward
Meanwhile, the two teachers [see profiles below] are confined to their homes with orders to wear electronic tracking devices. Their bail, says white county prosecutor Jerry Peace, was based not on race, but on the danger to the community and the likelihood that the defendants might flee. One teacher was released on $125,000 bail, the other, $110,000.
Racism runs deep in the town of Laurens, where one of the accused teachers taught. According to AP, an old movie theater has been converted into a Ku Klux Klan museum and paraphernalia store called The Red Neck Shop. There, visitors can buy Confederate flags — reminders of the Southern slave-holding states that seceded from the United States in 1861, sparking the Civil War — and bumper stickers, such as one that depicts three Klansmen and reads "The Original Boys in the Hood."
• Wendie Schweikert, a 37-year-old married woman who had been teaching elementary school in Laurens for more than a decade, was arrested last year after the mother of an 11-year-old boy accused her of having sex with the boy at school at least twice. Authorities said they found evidence bearing his DNA in her classroom. She is also accused of having sex with him in her car near a miniature golf course and arcade in Greenville, about 40 miles away.
• Allenna Ward, a 24-year-old minister's daughter in her second year of teaching, was fired Feb. 28 after she was charged with having sex with at least five boys. Some of the alleged victims, 14 and 15 years old, were students at the middle school in Clinton where Ward taught. Police say Ward, who is married, had sex with the boys at the school, at a motel, in a park and behind a restaurant.
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