Catholic high school says sorry after post of student in KKK outfit

Those pesky Klansmen! You just can’t get them out of the old school photos.

A Catholic school in Michigan is grappling with the dubious past of at least one of its former pupils.

In a social media fail of epic proportions, the Lansing Catholic High School shared a “throwback Thursday” photo on social media of a student wearing a Ku Klux Klan outfit.

The photo, which has since been deleted from the school’s Facebook and Instagram pages, came from the 1979 Lansing Catholic High School yearbook, the school said. It features a student wearing a white hood and robe with a cross, with several other students appearing to give a Nazi salute

The social media manager for the school has been placed on administrative leave, and the incident is under investigation, school president Dominic Iocco said on Facebook.

“I am very angry and very sorry that this ever happened,” he said. “It was wrong, offensive, and does not, in any way, reflect who we are as a school community.”

Iocco initially said the picture was from a theatrical production set in ancient Rome, but he clarified later in a statement that it was from an “Animal House”-style Halloween assembly. The popular 1978 film features the antics of members of a college fraternity.

The KKK is known as the “most infamous of American hate groups,” according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and is rooted in discrimination against several groups, including Catholics.

Numerous people shared Lansing Catholic High School’s photo, even after it was deleted from the school’s social media.

“I graduated from Catholic central in ‘71, and to hear that this was posted, it’s rather sad,” Randy Watkins, vice president of the Lansing NAACP, told the Lansing State Journal.

“I’m disappointed, angered that whoever is watching these pages (let that image) even be out there for 30 seconds.”

However, embarrassing as the social media fail is for the school, it could be worse. At least the incident itself happened decades ago. Far more recently, in 2019, at least two students showed up to a Wyoming high school in Klan robes, prompting a backlash from some parents who said the offenders were treated far too leniently.