The names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and other prominent figures, including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, will be removed from 44 public schools in San Francisco, a move that sparked debate on Wednesday over whether the famous liberal city took the national trial. about America’s racist past too far.
The San Francisco Board of Education’s decision in a 6-1 vote on Tuesday night affects a third of the city’s schools and came almost three years after the council started considering the idea. The approved resolution calls for the removal of names that have honored historical figures with direct or broad ties to slavery, oppression, racism or the “subjugation” of human beings.
In addition to Mr. Washington and Thomas Jefferson – former presidents who owned slaves – the list includes naturalist John Muir, Spanish priest Junipero Serra, patriot of the American Revolution Paul Revere and Francis Scott Key, composer of the “Star Spangled Banner”.
Changing the name of elementary school Dianne Feinstein, in honor of the Democratic senator and former mayor of San Francisco, was astonishing. The pioneering 87-year-old star has faded in recent years, with dismayed liberals adhering to requests for her retirement last year after she embraced Republican Senator Lindsey Graham at the end of the heated confirmation hearings for the U.S. Supreme Court judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Feinstein’s spokesman Tom Mentzer said the senator did not comment.
The committee that selected the names included Feinstein on the list because as mayor in 1984 she replaced a vandalized Confederate flag that was part of an old flag display in front of the city hall. When the flag was pulled a second time, she did not replace it.
“I want to assure people that this does not cancel or erase the story,” said San Francisco Education Council President Gabriela Lopez, commenting specifically on Feinstein and the broader group. “But it changes to defend and honor them, and these opportunities are a great way to have a conversation about our past and have the opportunity to raise new voices.”
Lopez said the decision is timely and important and sends a strong message that goes beyond racism linked to slavery and condemns more “racist symbols and a culture of white supremacy that we see in our country”.
For some San Francisco parents, the brushstroke was too broad.
“This is kind of a joke. It’s almost like a parody of leftist activism,” said Gerald Kanapathy, the father of two young children, including a kindergarten from a school that is not on the list.
“I don’t particularly care about the notion that some of the schools need to be renamed. There are many questionable options out there, ”he said. “But they kind of decided on it and moved on without much input from the community.”
Jeff Chiu / AP
A group called Families for San Francisco opposed the vote for similar reasons, calling it a “top-down process” in which a small group of people make the decision without consulting experts and the school community in general.
“We think it is very important for the community at large to get involved to find out who should be honored with public school names,” said Seeyew Mo, the group’s executive director.
“We would like to have history experts to provide a historical context, as we are assessing people in the past with today’s sensibilities,” he said.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who is black, considered the move inadequate due to the coronavirus pandemic that has kept the city’s schools closed since March.
“Our students are suffering, and we should talk about taking them to classrooms, getting mental health support and the resources they need at this challenging time,” said Breed, adding that he supports the discussion of renaming schools, but feels he must include parents, students and others and occur when classrooms are reopened.
The nomination process was led by a committee created in 2018 to study the names of district schools in the midst of a national judgment on racial injustice that followed a deadly confrontation at a white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The committee was asked to identify schools with names of people who were slave owners or had links to slavery, colonization, exploitation of workers or others, and anyone who oppressed women, children, gays or transsexuals. They also sought to change the names of schools that honored anyone linked to human rights or environmental abuse or defended racist or white supremacist beliefs.
Lopez said schools have until April to suggest new names, which the council will vote on, and the actual renaming “may take a few years”.
Historian Harold Holzer warned against what he called “danger of excess” if the country takes a wrecking ball into the past.
“I think there is a danger in applying 21st century moral standards to historical figures from a century or two ago,” he said. “We expect everyone to be perfect. We expect everyone to be enlightened. But an enlightened person from 1865 is not the same thing as an enlightened person from 2021.”
Holzer disagrees with the renaming of Abraham Lincoln High School, which the San Francisco committee said was due to the treatment of Native Americans during his administration.
In the middle of the Civil War in 1863, Mr. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the Confederacy.
“Nobody deserves more credit for the destruction of slavery,” said Holzer, a Lincoln Scholar and director of the Hunter College’s Roosevelt House of Public Policy Institute. “Lincoln is much more liberating than an abuser in terms of racial justice.”