At the college football championship game, the 2019 “Teacher of the Year” from Minnesota was seen kneeling during the pre-game national anthem, ABC reports.
The teacher, Kelly Holstine, later explained her gesture in a tweet in which she expressed her support for Colin Kaepernick and the black nationalist movement known as Black Lives Matter. With a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr., she falsely claimed that some people in America are not free.
Holstine, an English teacher at Tokata Learning Center in Shakopee, had previously kneeled during in 2016 in support of the BLM movement, and hosted a TED Talk in which she claimed that teachers need to be “allies” for “all of the human beings who are being marginalized or oppressed.”
Holstine has also been critical of the Trump Administration. In April of last year, she was one of only two teachers in the country who skipped the national “Teachers of the Year” ceremony at the White House. In her statement explaining her absence then, she falsely accused the Trump Administration of being “filled with a lot of hate toward the LGBTQ community.” President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump were also present at the championship game.