A white male former student at Howard University School of Law has filed a lawsuit against the predominantly black college, alleging racial discrimination and a “hostile educational environment” before being expelled in 2022.
Michael Newman, who was a student at HUSL from 2020 until 2022, asserted in a recent lawsuit filed on Feb. 16 that he endured “pain, suffering, emotional agony, and damage to his reputation” as a result of frequent racist harassment from at least one professor and a number of students at the institution.
After accepting a scholarship last December, Newman began attending the private school in the fall of 2020. According to the lawsuit, Newman’s LSAT score and college GPA were taken into account when awarding him the scholarship.
However, the lawsuit claims that Newman quickly started to encounter serious racial prejudice for expressing personal opinions in class, which was held virtually owing to COVID lockdowns. At one symposium in October 2020, Newman expressed his disagreement with a pro-Biden speaker by writing on a professor’s online discussion board, “Where I separate with the black community is where they feel government fixes problems; I only see it producing problems.” Later, Newman stated that he questioned whether Republican and Democratic officials ignored “the problems of black neighborhoods” because the black population consistently supported “the same party in elections.”
In January 2021, Newman discovered that a fellow HUSL student had discovered a tweet he had sent from a personal account seven months earlier. “But we don’t know what he did before the picture was taken,” said the tweet’s caption, which featured a picture of a severely battered slave. The lawsuit stated that the student who retweeted the image refused to converse with Newman and that responses to the tweet repeatedly made references to Newman’s “race, gender, sexual preference, age, and personal appearance. ” Although Newman later explained to his colleague that the message was intended to demonstrate the issues with assuming that black suspects who have become injured or die when in police custody must really have done something that deserved their fate.
In his case, Newman said that Howard quickly accepted such animosity from other students as the norm. He stated that other pupils frequently called him names like “mayo king” and “White Panther,” among other racial epithets. Reggie McGahee told Newman over the phone that he had turned into “the most disliked student” he had ever seen “in his stint at Howard Law” after Newman attempted to discuss the racial prejudice with him.
