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Flaunting the Freak Flag: Karr v. Schmidt and the Great Hair Debate in American High Schools, 1965–1975
Gael Graham
| In the fall of 1970, sixteen-year-old Chesley Karr returned to Coronado High School in El Paso, Texas, after a summer spent harvesting wheat in the Midwest. During his working vacation, he had let his hair grow out over his ears and collar. Later he asserted that his long hair, which he referred to as a "freak flag," was both "a cultural statement and a practical matter." Culturally, he believed his hair identified him as a supporter of the "peace or hippie movement"; practically, haircuts had been a low priority on the wheat farm. To his surprise, the high school gym coach refused to admit him to class; the issue then ascended through the principal's office to the school board, which told Karr he could not return to school without a haircut. Rather than acquiesce, Chesley Karr took his school to court.1 |
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Battles over masculine hairstyles were nothing new in this period. Once the Beatles and their imitators popularized longer locks in the early 1960s, fierce struggles ensued between proponents and opponents of the style. Where opponents of long hair possessed institutional power—in schools, prisons, the military, many work-places—they often wielded that power in favor of their fashion choice, mandating short hair for males. Numerous high schools adopted dress codes that specified how boys were to wear their hair. By the mid-1960s, however, long-haired students were fighting back. Many high school students turned to the courts; an astonishing number, including Chesley Karr, sought justice from federal rather than state courts. High school boys dominated the federal court cases relating to hair regulations. Over one hundred hair cases were appealed to the U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals; nine appealed all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. For the historian, these cases open a window on multiple conversations that reveal the fault lines and fissures in American society. While the issue of long hair on minor boys may seem trivial today—many contemporaries, including judges, found it trivial then—the tenacity with which both proponents and opponents of long hair pursued judgments in their favor forces us to ask: What was that all about? What can it tell us about the era known as "the sixties"? |
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Adopting a social and cultural perspective, this paper examines the legal challenges to high school rules about the length of male students' hair considered in the federal appellate courts. The testimonies of the students and school administrators reveal what each believed was at stake. Similar testimony about the significance of long hair comes from court opinions, editorials, and letters from ordinary Americans. Sorting through the opinions of these four groups—students, school officials, judges, and the public—sheds light on two separate but related phenomena: the high school student rights movement and the public debate about masculine long hair. In the end, no consensus emerged on what long hair meant or why it mattered (or failed to matter). The battle between students and school officials ended with similar ambiguity: although neither students nor administrators scored a complete victory in the hair debate, when the surge of high school student activism ended around 1975, school officials' power over students had sharply declined, largely due to judicial decisions. That change marks an important phase in the history of childhood and suggests that our understanding of the revolutions of the 1960s and the role of the courts in shaping them needs to be broadened to include some of the youngest members of society.2 |
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