South Carolina state representative Seth Whipper has called for Academic Magnet football coach to be investigated and potentially fired for a racially insensitive postgame celebration — YouTube screen shot

It is the story that just won’t go away.

According to the Charleston Post and Courier, recently re-instated Academic Magnet head football coach Bud Walpole is under fire again, this time from the state politicain who represents his own district. Less than a day after Walpole was allowed to return to his job by Charleston Superintendent Nancy McGinley, South Carolina state representative Seth Whipper banded with a group of alumni from a former school that struggled with integration to call for Walpole to be suspended and, if full leaked details were proven to be true, to be fired.

Whipper called for the “true facts” of the team’s postgame watermelon ritual to be discovered via an investigation, with resulting penalties to follow accordingly and firing a distinct possibility.

“If the facts are that this particular act did occur then we’re going to ask that everybody be terminated,” Whipper told the media at an appearance in Charleston.

The involvement of alumni from the Bonds-Wilson school was an important development. One of the more disturbing (if less reported) details to come out of the internal investigation into Academic Magnet’s postgame routine was the tendency for players to call some of the watermelons they would smash “Bonds-Wilson.” That name is a reference to the Bonds-Wilson school, which began as a segregated school before being integrated in the 1970s, was eventually closed in 1985. As noted by the Post and Courier, it sat on a site near the present day Academic Magnet campus, hence the reference and concerns with racist overtones.

Walpole, who was initially fired when details of the postgame routine became public, has apologized to a local NAACP leader for the inappropriate celebrations and insisted that he did not see the celebrations as racially insensitive at the time.

Whipper insisted that the use of Bonds-Wilson as the moniker for the team’s smashed watermelons was intentionally inflammatory, and questioned how district officials could reinstate a man who oversaw such a practice without immediately correcting his own student athletes.

“The Bonds-Wilson community is really disturbed about this that somehow the name Bonds-Wilson is not good enough to name the school in that way, but good enough to name a watermelon,” Whipper said. “We can’t accept that so something will be done.”

Whipper plans to attend the Charleston County School Board meeting on Monday to air his concerns, two days after Walpole and Academic Magnet will take to the field again; the Raptors travel to Battery Creek on Friday, Oct. 24.