It started like any other day in Michelle Mickens’ high school English classroom at Oglethorpe County High School in Lexington, Georgia, near Athens.
While teaching poetry to 18 teenagers on Sept. 10, she made a bargain with the class: Work through the day’s lesson and instead of starting the next day’s work early, they’d have 10 minutes of free time.
The students made it through the lesson without incident. As the poetry lesson concluded, news broke across the country that hard-right figure Charlie Kirk had been shot on a Utah college campus. Mickens finished her day, went home and logged on to her personal Facebook account.
Mickens would find out that Kirk — founder and president of Turning Point USA, a hard-right organization with a heavy influence in conservative politics — was pronounced dead from a gunshot to the neck. She posted a direct quote from Kirk — in which he advocated the protection of gun rights in spite of more gun deaths to come — to Facebook.
In the video: Michelle Mickens, an English teacher at Oglethorpe County High School in Lexington, Georgia, was placed on paid administrative leave after posting on Facebook about Charlie Kirk after he was killed Sept. 10. In this video, she talks about the repercussions she’s faced since the incident and why she believes it was blown out of proportion. (Credit: SPLC)
She discussed the quote with her Facebook friends in the comments. During the back-and-forth discussion, she criticized Kirk’s opposition to gun control but also condemned political violence and articulated her hope for a safer world.
“I don’t condone violence of any kind,” she wrote in the comments to a friend, “and I certainly don’t condone this, but he was a horrible person, a fascist full of hate for anyone who was different. While I’m sad that we live in a country where gun violence is an epidemic, the world is a bit safer without him.”
Despite the heated nature, Mickens said she felt the conversations ended amicably.
“We didn’t unfriend each other,” she said of the Facebook friends in the discussion, noting that she felt the conversation ended on an OK note. “When you talk about things in politics, people are going to feel strongly.”
She went to sleep thinking she would be back in the classroom the next day, teaching poetry. But what she did not know at the time was that online agitators had shared her post with groups aiming to retaliate against teachers who criticized Kirk. By the end of the weekend, school district leaders told Mickens, a member of the Georgia Association of Educators, not to return to the classroom.
Mickens filed a federal lawsuit on Oct. 20 against her employer, the Oglethorpe County School System and Superintendent Beverly Levine. The lawsuit accuses the school and superintendent of violating Mickens’ First Amendment right to free speech. They attempted to dismiss Mickens for posting the quote from Kirk about gun deaths to her personal Facebook page from her home after school hours, according to the suit filed by the Southern Poverty Law Center and co-counsels Georgia Association of Educators (GAE), the Law Offices of Gerry Weber, and Barrett & Farahany.
“As an educator and GAE member, Michelle understands that her union is committed to standing up to defend her rights. In the context of advocacy by members of the Georgia Association of Educators, the First Amendment protects the right of public employees to associate, speak, and petition freely. The school district may not retaliate against individuals or associations for their exercise of First Amendment rights by imposing sanctions for the expression of particular views,” Georgia Association of Educators General Counsel Mike McGonigle said in a statement.
The school has placed Mickens — a statewide finalist for Georgia Teacher of the Year — on leave for engaging in constitutionally protected speech that caused no disruption to the school, according to the lawsuit.
“I had done my student teaching at Oglethorpe in 2002. I thought I’d retire there,” Mickens said. “I haven’t been back to the school since.”
Fighting for her voice
“This isn’t a case where they’re trying to discipline her for something she said in the classroom,” said Michael Tafelski, interim deputy legal director for the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team, which is representing Mickens in the lawsuit. “This happened out of the classroom. And the District had no social media policy to restrict her comments.”
He said that as a public school teacher, Mickens is a government employee and retains constitutional protections.
“It’s unfortunate that we have to file a lawsuit to protect those rights,” Tafelski said. “But she absolutely has the right to make comments on matters of public concern and that’s protected speech.”
At the center of the case is the fact that Mickens posted a quote from Kirk from a conversation he had onstage at a 2023 event for his nonprofit organization in Utah. The post read, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. — Charlie Kirk.”
“It was more a statement on gun control than him,” Mickens said.
As a teacher, she had witnessed firsthand what gun violence can do to a school community. One fall, a series of unrelated shootings occurred in quick succession in her small community, and she saw her students become withdrawn and anxious, she said.
“We had no grief counselors. The school offered zero resources. If anything they got stricter about attendance,” she said about the rural school where she taught in 2020. “For the year or two following, we had a lot of tension in the community, and it was devastating.”
Having watched her students endure years of gun violence, she said, Kirk’s quote on the Second Amendment being worth it “was a devastating thing to say. The quote really stood out to me.”
Mickens is a part of wave of public sector employees who are being threatened, disciplined or outright fired for speech about Kirk’s death.
A landscape supervisor was fired at Auburn University for posting about Kirk’s killing. An English professor was dismissed from Auburn and the University of Alabama after posting about Kirk on social media. An Arkansas Department of Health official working in tobacco prevention was dismissed after a Facebook post about Kirk’s assassination. In Florida, a biologist with the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission was terminated after sharing a post about Kirk’s killing in her private Instagram story. In Tennessee, a high school teacher was suspended without pay last month after posting on her private Instagram account about the assassination. And an elementary school teacher was dismissed in Tennessee for sharing two Facebook posts about Kirk’s killing.
These are just some of the employees who have filed federal lawsuits.
The SPLC’s Intelligence Project, which monitors and exposes activities of the hard right, tracked the far-right conspiracy theories that followed Kirk’s death and, specifically, the backlash that followed against educators.
“We documented extremist figures promoting some of the hard right’s often-repeated conspiracy theories, including falsely blaming educators for corrupting the minds of youth,” said Rachel Carroll Rivas, interim director of the Intelligence Project. “And it started to carry over into doxing campaigns of teachers.”
Mickens’ suit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Georgia, aims to restore her job and remove any potential blemishes from the incident from her personnel file. It also seeks to garner any reasonable financial compensation such as lost wages. Additionally, the suit aims to protect other educators from punishment by their school districts for exercising their First Amendment right to free speech.
“Her employer, the government, cannot stifle that speech made in her own private quarters,” Tafelski said, adding that Mickens said that she did not “condone political violence” in the back-and-forth comments among her Facebook friends on that fateful evening. “This case is rooted in facts and truth, not speculation.”
On Sept. 11, only one day after Kirk was killed, Oglethorpe Principal Bill Sampson and Superintendent Levine told Mickens that the school received a complaint from someone unrelated to the school district, but she was not in trouble. They didn’t tell her what the complaint was about “so I hadn’t made the connection,” Mickens said.
Unbeknownst to Mickens at the time, while that post was set to “friends only” privacy, a former classmate who lives in Illinois shared her private Facebook post publicly on X, the site formerly known as Twitter.
“It surprised me he felt so compelled to do that. I felt more sorry than angry,” she said.
That night, Mickens found out about the former classmate who had shared her post, including that they shared an article about a different teacher’s dismissal, commenting “The Georgia b—- is next,” apparently referring to Mickens.
Preemptively, Mickens met with Sampson and Levine to talk about next steps.
“Believe it or not, our last face-to-face was cordial,” she said, adding that no one was initially sure what to do in the case of doxing, or publicly identifying someone and publishing private information about them as a form of punishment or revenge.
“It was cordial until they pushed me to resign,” she said.
Left in the cold
As the Georgia air turns nippy for the fall season, Mickens remains out of the classroom. Her biggest worry is for the children in her classrooms.
“I know I didn’t do anything wrong so I never felt scared,” she said. “I felt sorry for the kids. Kids, even high school kids, need consistency.”
At one point, Mickens worried the school district would be going after her teaching license, alleging that she violated professional ethics.
“What’s given me strength is that I’ve gotten support from people who can’t publicly support me because of where they work, like state and local officials,” Mickens said. “It’s not about me. I just happen to be the face. I won’t be the last person this happens to.”
Among her rural community and professional colleagues, Mickens’ lawsuit is big news.
It’s unfortunate that we have to file a lawsuit to protect those rights. But she absolutely has the right to make comments on matters of public concern and that’s protected speech.”
– Michael Tafelski, interim deputy legal director for the SPLC’s Democracy: Education and Youth litigation team
Trevon Lamar, 29, a former student of Mickens who is now also a metro Atlanta high school history teacher, found it hard to watch the hard right’s vilification of Mickens, who he said is a good teacher and does not deserve to be treated this way.
“Since it did escalate to this point, I’m glad she is filing the lawsuit, because being a teacher myself, people expect us to not state an opinion or have an opinion at all,” Lamar said. “My question is why? Teachers have freedom of speech like anyone else.”
When Lamar was a student, Mickens encouraged him — “the quiet kid in class” — to apply for dual enrollment instead of just attending high school.
“[Learning about the lawsuit] was a mix of emotions, but I am glad she’s doing it. It’s for teachers everywhere,” Lamar said.
‘If I lose, we all lose’
Mickens, who has wanted to be an educator since corralling her siblings into playing “classroom” in their garage as children, wiped tears from her eyes as she discussed the need to stand up for the First Amendment rights of public educators and public education in general.
“I feel like it’s a duty. I feel honored that I’m carrying this for other people,” she said. “One thing people need to understand is if I lose, we all lose. The First Amendment doesn’t know a side or a political party. It benefits all of us, including the people who said horrible things about me or called me names.”
Regardless of the consequences, Mickens said she is more than prepared to see the fight through.
“I think if I was 25 years old, I’d be terrified,” Mickens said. “I’m 55 and I’m unafraid.”
Image at top: “I won’t be the last person this happens to,” says Georgia teacher Michelle Mickens, who was suspended for a Facebook post about Charlie Kirk. (Credit: David Naugle)