Claudia Grisales
UT Daily Texan
AUSTIN (U-WIRE) - Thomas Chisum Womack, a cadet at Texas A&M University, is suing the university after the school forced him to remove a sticker of the Confederate flag from his foot locker last year.
The flag was prohibited under the Corps' ban on offensive symbols, which includes the Confederate flag. Kirk Lyons, Womack's attorney, said his client filed the lawsuit because the Corps' policy violated his First Amendment rights.
"(He is) claiming a Corps policy barring the display of Confederate symbols is unconstitutional," Lyons said.
The Corps of Cadets manual has banned the display of "divisive" symbols in the past, but it was not until last year that Corps Commandant Maj. Gen. M.T. Hopgood amended the language of the ban to specifically include the symbol of the Confederate flag.
Maj. Doc Mills, a spokesman for the Office of the Commandant at A&M, said the university has not had a problem with enforcing the offensive-symbol rule in the past.
"We have for some time discouraged the display of the Confederate flag - it was covered in different language," Mills said.
"I believe it was since the late 1980s that this has been a long-standing policy for the Corps of Cadets."
Lyons said it is "rank hypocrisy" that the university would bar Confederate symbols.
"We like A&M, but he should not have to choose between his heritage and the cadets," Lyons said.
"With a state-supported university, the cadets should not have to subsidize the censorship practices of the Corps of Cadets."
Womack, a sophomore agricultural journalism major, would not directly comment on the case, but his mother, Syler Womack, said in a statement, "We were stonewalled by the university. The lawsuit is a last-ditch effort to secure my son's civil rights."
Syler Womack, who calls herself a Confederate Texan, said the 3-by-5-inch Confederate flag sticker was first removed from her son's footlocker in his absence.
When Womack put the Confederate symbol back on his locker, he was told he would get in trouble, so he removed it.
She said a Corps official told her that he would have to choose between his "Confederate heritage" and his membership in the Corps.
"My son's fight is not about embarrassing A&M or the Corps - it is about preventing the not-so-slow erosion of Aggieland's proud heritage," Syler Womack said.
Corps leaders maintained in a statement released by the university's Corps of Cadets that A&M has no historical ties with the former Confederate States of America.
"When students join the Corps, they voluntarily agree to submit themselves to the discipline of a military lifestyle and the regulations that govern it," according to the Corps' statement.
"One requisite of such a lifestyle is that they must sometimes temper their exercise of individual rights for the good of the organization. Display of the Confederate battle flag is one such right."
But Syler Womack said the flag honors their ancestors who fought for the original standards of the U.S. Constitution, and that her son should be allowed to freely display it.
"I think it's sad. I'm not quite certain how it came about," she said, acknowledging that many people take offense to the flag.
The suit, filed May 15, is scheduled for a pretrial conference Aug. 28.