A federal court has ruled that a California public school has the authority to prevent students from wearing clothing emblazoned with pro-American messages on the Mexican holiday Cinco de Mayo.

U. S. District Court Judge James Ware was ruling in a case involving students at Live Oak High School in Morgan Hill, CA, who were banned from wearing American flag t-shirts on the Mexican holiday.

The judge determined that the Morgan Hill Unified School District did not violate the First Amendment and said that concerns by school officials over possible violence justified censoring the pro-American message.

The case arose in an ethnically charged atmosphere at Live Oak High School. On the previous Cinco de Mayo, Ware said, a group of Mexican-American students walked around with a Mexican flag, and a group of Anglo students responded by hoisting a makeshift American flag up a tree, chanting “USA” and exchanging profanities and threats with the Latino youths.

When three students showed up on May 5, 2010, with U.S. flag images on their shirts, the judge said, an assistant principal asked them to remove the shirts or turn them inside out, and ordered them to his office when they refused. After a 90-minute session with the students, two others wearing similar shirts and one parent, the principal sent two of the youths home for the day.

Their lawsuit accused school officials of violating the standard that the Supreme Court set in 1969 when it upheld students’ right to wear black armbands to class, in a silent protest against the Vietnam War, and said schools can suppress student expression only when it threatens to disrupt the educational process.

The flag-bearing shirts caused no disruption, the students’ lawyers said, and school officials were not entitled to interfere just because they believed “the patriotic message may offend some students.” They also said the school allowed Mexican-American youths to wear colors of the Mexican flag that day