Racism in our schools

Jasmine Guy (b 1962), an American actress, singer and dancer once said “Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth”.

A teacher working at a local high school in Pittsworth, 40 minutes drive from my hometown of Toowoomba, pleaded guilty in the Supreme Court of Queensland on May 13 to being an accessory after the fact of murder and lying to police.

These startling revelations are disturbing when read as a news headline but when the lucidity of the prosecutor’s graphic account comes into play it personally horrifies and heightens my awareness of a crime that raises more questions than answers on the propriety of that noble profession of classroom teacher.

Graeme Frederick McNeil, 46, was charged with assisting his high school student, Anthony Rowlingson, who at aged 16 shot his 19-year-old brother Robert twice in the back of the head with a heavy-calibre .243 rifle in July 2007. The court transcript read that McNeil helped Rowlingson to dump his brother’s body over a bridge into a waterway on the Clifton-Leyburn Road between Pittsworth and Clifton on Sunday, July 15, 2007.

I sat transfixed to my local television news coverage: it was disturbing to think that the broadcasted images of this regular looking, heavy-set man with a thick moustache entering the court room could be of someone complicit in such a hideous murder cover-up.

When McNeil was approached by Anthony Rowlingson with his confession, the proper approach one would have expected from a person holding a responsible position in society would have been for McNeil to encourage his student to hand himself in to the police and confess mitigating circumstances for the crime.

The Toowoomba Chronicle reported the following day that Crown prosecutor Phil McCarthy said Rowlingson’s parents, John and Wendell Rowlingson, who were in court for the sentencing were left with a feeling of “betrayal” by the actions of McNeil who had been a respected teacher and role model for their son Anthony.

These snippets of news of this ghastly story were broadly the extent of the coverage of our local media outlets. Mind you the coverage that there was certainly caught my attention and momentarily put me off my evening meal.

It wasn’t until well after I read the court report in The Toowoomba Chronicle early the following day and when I started to receive numerous calls from national media outlets seeking my comments on an article by Tony Koch from The Australian about the murder that I discovered there was considerably more to this bizarre case.

Koch commenced his article by highlighting the fact that “a teacher who confessed to being a senior Ku Klux Klan official has been jailed for eight years after helping a teenage student to dump the murdered body of his older brother, who had threatened to expose the links to the racist organisation”.

If my local evening news had approached their broadcast in the same succinct manner as Koch with the KKK aspect included then I certainly wouldn’t have gone back for a second serve of my Thai chicken curry, such would’ve been the bitter residual taste from that news angle. After my experience with the Klan in my hometown still raw in my mind from my successful decade-long E.S. “Nigger” Brown Stand campaign, I would’ve felt nauseous and slept uncomfortably that night with the knowledge that those cowardly men, who had a penchant for wearing punctuated white pillow cases over their heads, were still active in my community.

Koch reported that McNeil confessed to police that he was the Imperial Kluk or the Ku Klux Klan, which he said was also known as supreme KKK chaplain.

Koch further reported that McNeil told police he had lent his personal computer to Anthony Rowlingson before the murder and that Rowlingson had "taken liberties with my laptop" and downloaded details of his involvement with the KKK. Koch wrote:

"I asked him (after the murder) to destroy whatever information he had on me," McNeil said in his police statement in July 2007.

"I asked him to do this because I didn't want that information getting into other people's hands.

"I made it clear that, in my position, if that is found out, it's going to cause a lot of problems for me and my family.

"The material included letters I wrote to address the Klan, copies of order forms for stuff to come across, and emails to other (KKK) officers."

The reason this particular story resonates with me is that this man could’ve been responsible for sending me, or ordering others to send me, those awful letters that I received when I first started publicly fighting for the removal of the word “Nigger” from a relic sign of a racist past back in 1999.

Much of the mail that I received, and routinely handed to police forensic unit for testing, had letterheads depicting images of white-hooded Ku Klux Klan figures and bearing the words “White Pride, White Power”. One letter concluded with “And remember - Don’t snigger nigger the Klan is getting bigger” with an image of a Klansman holding a noose at the bottom of the page.

Another letter read:

Steve Hagan - You low life “Nigger” mongrel
How dare you attempt to extort money from the
White Australian taxpayers of this community.
We will never submit to your demands regarding
The Nigger Brown Stand
Be silent or we will pay you a visit.
CC: To the Mayor of Toowoomba - a copy of this
Letter has been sent to that troublesome “Coon”
Steve Hagan - Keep it in mind that we are
On your side.
Best wishes the KKK

Another incident that I made public was the threat, found in a student’s diary at a local Toowoomba high school, to kill Aboriginal students at the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month in 1999. On the day of the planned attack most Indigenous parents kept their children at home as did several non-Indigenous parents. There was a big media presence at the school but fortunately the day came and went without incident.

A couple of days later when police raided the house of a boy and his friends in question and found suspicious items of interest, the media built the story up as a copycat of the Columbine High School massacre that occurred in the United States earlier that year.

It wasn’t until weeks later that the truth behind the harassment of the Aboriginal students by this disturbed boy became clear. It was alleged that his father had arrived at the school weeks earlier and passed a baseball bat through the window of his car, telling his son to take care of the “troublesome niggers”. The “troublesome niggers” were my nephew and his friends who attended the same high school.

I’m not sure of the motive of the local news outlets in Toowoomba to leaving out that important KKK information from their coverage of McNeil (the teacher) and Rowlingson (the converted KKK high school student) - possibly lazy journalism or a deliberately sinister suppression of an awkward topic - only they could answer that question.

Perhaps I’m being a little over-sensitive by drawing a parallel between my decade long battle with operatives who purported to represent the Ku Klux Klan in my community and this obnoxious man who hid behind the veil of class-room-teacher respectability to solicit impressionable and disturbed students to his right-wing-racist organisation.

Maybe now is the time, following this incident, for school principals to be more vigilant of strange activities or liaisons their teachers engage in with their students, especially young white boys in high schools who feel isolated and undervalued by their peers.

I hope during their lengthy period of incarceration both McNeil and Rowlingson find time to read Jasmine Guy’s famous quotation, “Bigotry dwarfs the soul by shutting out the truth” and break free from the shackles of xenophobia that are suffocating them.