at the district i worked in previously the most recent named schools were named after two local world war 2 heroes, one white and one black. the high school and the junior high are named the high school and the junior high. the four elementary schools are named from texas founders–houston, travis, austin, and navarro. the two early childhood centers are named after notable educators from the district from the 30s and 40s.
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Where I grew up, there is one Catholic School named for a person, one public elementary school named for a local woman who was a city historian (how about that, @Mindysan33 ?) and another elementary school named for George Washington. All of the other 40+ schools are named after streets, housing tracts or geographical and natural landmarks (mainly mountains and trees).
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I love that!
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…but tired.
also, thank you @Scientist , for correctly pointing out what @Mindysan33 and others have laboriously explained, this racism bullshit is not aligned with any region, state or county, it is nationwide and systemic. it does no one any good to call out southern states for what is obviously a huge problem everywhere.
there are some of us in these “horrible” states working hard to promote a more just and equitable society, just don’t tell everyone or we’ll be overrun by folks from NY and CA. (see what I did there?)
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Meh. I’d prefer Malcolm X High School or William Tecumseh Sherman Elementary. I think a Sherman Elementary would really be sweet in Georgia.
How to say…Catholic church kept great records, almost as good as the Romans, but embellished a lot when it came to ‘miracles’ for canonization purposes.
[Weirdly, I trashed my hot take, and the comment system posted part of it anyway, sorry all.]
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Definitely, but even more so the ones at “public” universities.
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I went to Robert E. Lee HS in Houston in the '70s, and glad to say it’s gone now. Not just the name – the building ran through its life cycle so they tore it down and rebuilt it as Margaret Long Wisdom HS, named after a revered teacher.
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For an official name change, those are good. I was thinking more of an unofficial guerilla change. Start spreading the word that the school is really named after the playwright. Quote him frequently. Slap his picture everywhere. Basically co-opt the name. Rob it of it’s power. Dilute it such that fewer people will object to changing it. And have fun doing it.
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Also the reverse. California is the most democratic state in the nation by far and makes Massachusetts and New York look like Texas at least when it comes to national elections, but we have tons of racist assholes here, as well as a huge numbers of liberal NIMBYs who support all kinds of progressive policies at the national or even state level, but in many areas build discriminatory and regressive local policies that would be perfectly at home in any stereotypical “southern state”
We have to fight this everywhere, not just the places where the government literally took up arms to protect slavery.
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At a @DuvalSchools hearing about changing the name of Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville, Florida, one white man says “slaves are to obey their masters,”
Competition is stiff this day and age, but this may actually be the single most ignorant statement ever uttered about morality.
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Raise your hand if anyone is surprised this is Florida?
This is true of so many awful things that Americans think “have always been like that”. Other good examples include the Pledge Of Allegiance, and “In God We Trust” on the money (the latter being the most blatant 1A violation lying around. It seems that this is when the culture war started in earnest and white people came out swinging when they still had peak public support for terrible and creepy things. No doubt McCarthyism and Red Panic was fueling it as well.
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It’s common in Canada as well. Mostly named after famous Brits (there are seemingly thousands of Sir Winston Churchill high schools in the country- every city has one) and early Canadian politicians.
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If you really want to piss off somebody who venerates Robert E. Lee, just remind them that Lee was a mediocre general who owed most of his success on the battlefield to subordinate generals like Jackson and Longstreet. His army did not do so well after he lost Jackson in the middle of the war, and many of his generals criticized him for his poor decisions at Gettysburg, with General Pickett famously saying, “That old man destroyed my division.”
FTFY…
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plenty of schools were named after Stonewall Jackson, too. It doesn’t matter whether he was a capable general, or a guy who was shot by his own men. He worked for the cause of slavery and white supremacy.
That part isn’t going to piss off the people who venerate him, though. For them, that part is a feature, not a bug.
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I guess I just prefer a brute force approach, like going to those school board meetings and saying “Trump doesn’t like generals who surrender. Name this school after a winning general, like W.T. Sherman!”
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