Principal told black teacher to 'be like Jackie Robinson' and put up with colleagues' racist abuse: lawsuit

A new lawsuit filed with the U.S. District Court in New Jersey alleges that a black teacher was subjected to constant racist abuse -- and was told to put up with it by the school's principal, who also happened to be black.

NBC News reports that Tammy Jordan, a former second-grade teacher at the Larchmont Elementary School in Mount Laurel, New Jersey, is claiming that her white colleagues routinely questioned her intelligence and would deny her access to laptops, televisions and other classroom equipment needed to conduct her lessons.

Jordan alleges that when she talked with school principal George Jackson, he told her that her white colleagues didn't mean to be racist against her and advised her to learn how to cope with it.

"We have to be like Jackie Robinson," he told her, according to the lawsuit.

Jordan was allegedly also told by white colleagues that they did not have time to develop a curriculum on black history, even though one white teacher had spent an entire week teaching students about Dr. Seuss.

She complained about this to Jackson, who told her that her white colleagues were "not ready for all of that yet," and said she shouldn't think "too much with the emotional part" of her brain, the suit claims.

Jordan was the first black teacher hired by the school since the 1980s, and she quit the job just two years after being hired in 2016.

Read more about the lawsuit here.