The MAGA cap-wearing Kentucky high school student caught on video mocking a Native American demonstrator gave his side of the story Sunday, claiming he’s not a racist but was in fact trying to keep the peace.
Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann, a junior, said, “I never interacted with this protestor. I did not speak to him. I did not make any hand gestures or other aggressive moves.” He goes on to add that he “even said a silent prayer that the situation would not get out of hand.”
Claiming that he’s been called “every name in the book, including a racist” ever since the video filmed Friday at a March for Life anti-abortion event in Washington, D.C., event emerged, he added that he and his family have received death threats. He released the statement to “correct misinformation and outright lies being spread about my family and me.”
Sandmann and his schoolmates crossed paths with Nathan Phillips and other Native Americans at the end of the Indigenous Peoples March as they performed the “American Indian Movement” song. In the video that has gone viral, they were filmed clapping with smiles plastered on their faces as they mockingly sang and danced along to the song. A smirking Sandmann stands face-to-face with Vietnam War veteran Phillips – a Nebraska native of the Omaha tribe who now lives in Michigan — blocking his path and grinning in his face as his friends looked on, laughed and filmed him.
According to the student’s account reported by CNN, what transpired before Phillips and the other Native Americans got there was far more aggressive. He said the African-American protesters on the Lincoln Memorial steps with his group taunted them for a while before his fellow students asked chaperones for permission to chant their school sports songs, designed to raise spirit.
“The protesters said hateful things,” Sandman’s statement said of the Hebrew Israelites, referring to them as African-American protesters. “They called us ‘racists,’ ‘bigots,’ ‘white crackers,’ ‘f—ts’ and ‘incest kids.’ They also taunted an African-American student from my school by telling him that we would ‘harvest his organs.’ ”
When Phillips and his group approached, Sandmann said, the crowd “parted for him,” and no one blocked his path.
“At no time did I hear any student chant anything other than the school spirit chants,” Sandmann said. “I did not witness or hear any students chant ‘build that wall’ or anything hateful or racist at any time. Assertions to the contrary are simply false. Our chants were loud because we wanted to drown out the hateful comments that were being shouted at us by the protestors.”
Sandmann says Phillips then “locked eyes with me and approached me, coming within inches of my face.”
“He played his drum the entire time he was in my face,” the student goes on to say.
He added that he was “startled and confused” by Phillips’ actions.
A woman claiming to be the mother of one of the students told news outlets on Sunday that the Native group members themselves were the aggressors, not the other way around. The woman said Phillips – referring to him as “this man” – got into the teen’s face with his drum and that the students themselves were being harassed by people she called “Black Muslims.”
Phillips, 64, explained his version of events to the Detroit Free Press on Sunday, and said the boys initially took issue not with his group, but with a religious group called the Black Hebrew Israelites.
Phillips said the Israelites had four people speaking and saying some “harsh things” that the boys did not agree with and were offended by.
He said he intervened as things escalated between the two groups.
“I put myself in between that, between a rock and a hard place,” he said, noting that was when he became the “beastly” boys’ new prey.
“[They had a] mob mentality that was scary. . . . It was ugly, what these kids were involved. It was racism. It was hatred. It was scary.”
He also compared the looks of “glee and hatred” on the boys’ faces to those who happily lynched people, and criticized the school’s chaperones for failing to keep an eye on the students.
Phillips has faced racial harassment before, as Native Americans do daily. He told the Detroit Free Press that he had a beer can thrown at him after he told a group of Eastern Michigan University students that their Native American costumes were racist.
“It’s like we need somebody to blame again for our failings,” he said. “Our President is kind of . . . feeding the fires of racism. Some of the things he’s been saying have been divisive, the building of the wall. . . . Why do we have to build a wall on the southern border and not the northern border?”
The Diocese of Covington and Covington Catholic High School in Covington, Ky., issued a statement condemning the students’ actions and apologizing to Phillips.
“This behavior is opposed to the church’s teachings on the dignity and respect of the human person,” the statement read. “The matter is being investigated and we will take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion.”
