A Black educator was hired to reform a school that held a mock slave auction. It was a racist nightmare, she says
After a fifth-grade teacher at an elite private school in suburban New York conducted a mock slave auction — in which Black students were “sold” to their white classmates — as part of her social studies class, a state investigation determined the wildly misguided reenactment had had a “profoundly negative effect” on all of the children involved.
As a result, the Chapel School, a Lutheran institution that says its mission is to “know, live, and share the love of Christ,” fired the teacher involved and agreed to address issues of racial insensitivity within its walls, which included hiring a chief diversity officer to oversee the initiative.
“We accept responsibility for the overall findings [of the state investigation], and we are committed to implementing all items outlined by the attorney general to help us deepen our cultural competence,” Principal Michael Schultz said in a statement at the time.
But, according to a harrowing $3 million lawsuit obtained by The Independent, the Ivy League-educated Black woman selected for the job now says school administrators lied to the AG about diversifying the faculty, forced her to submit falsified documentation to James’s office, and subjected her to unchecked bigotry by faculty and pupils alike.
In one particularly troubling instance, Treda Collier Dickenman’s complaint says students doctored her official portrait in the Chapel School directory “by turning the photo into a grotesque racial caricature, depicting her as a so-called ghetto rapper adorned with stereotypical artifacts like a gold chain around her neck, gold teeth, and a cigarette hanging from her mouth.”
As for the administration, Collier Dickenman alleges in her complaint that she was set up to fail, while being used merely as “an unknowing decoy, a token representative to mislead the Attorney General, falsely signaling compliance while secretly maintaining the same exclusionary… practices they had always upheld.”
Broadly speaking, Collier Dickenman’s complaint, which was filed in Manhattan federal court on Friday and assigned to a magistrate judge on Monday, contends the Chapel School’s conduct “was not just evasion, it was fraud.”
On Monday evening, Senior Pastor Robert Hartwell of the Chapel School, who is named as a defendant in Collier Dickenman’s suit, told The Independent, “We don’t provide comment on pending litigation… We care deeply for our community and when possible we would love to talk more about our programs and services that characterize our mission to congregation, children and community.”
Collier Dickenman’s attorney, Rebecca Brazzano, also declined to comment in detail, but told The Independent, “I can offer that Ms. Collier Dickenman is both resilient and extraordinary in her courageousness.”
Messages sent to AG James’s office went unanswered.
When Collier Dickenman applied in July 2019 for the newly created chief diversity officer position, she was “excited about this new potential new role,” her complaint states. It says she believed the Chapel School “understood the severity of what was at stake and were fully invested in the serious work ahead,” and that she was “eager to forge ahead to share her talent in what appeared to be a committed, community-focused, professional, self-reflective, responsive, motivated, and cooperative team.”
However, when Collier Dickenman began working at the Chapel School that November, the complaint says she started seeing red flags immediately.
Rather than accepting responsibility for making things right after the mock slave auction was exposed, school administrators blamed “everyone else” for having reported it to the Attorney General’s Office, the complaint states. It says Collier Dickenman was utilized as, simply, “a token Black marionette figure while ensuring real power remained in the hands of White male Lutheran leadership.”
“From the moment [Collier Dickenman] assumed the role of Chief Diversity Officer, [the school] launched a relentless campaign to diminish, isolate, and impede her,” according to the complaint.
