“Across the South, students, parents, and alumni are demanding name changes for schools that honor the men who waged war to maintain slavery, writes Corey Mitchell in Education Week.
Robert E. Lee
Ed Week‘s survey found 185 schools in 17 states named for Confederate soldiers: 53 for Gen. Robert E. Lee and “more than a dozen each” for Gen. Stonewall Jackson and Sidney Lanier, a poet who served as a private.
“Other schools bear the names of individuals with racist histories, including 22 that are named after politicians who signed the Southern Manifesto opposing school integration after the 1954 Brown vs. Board Supreme Court decision,” writes Mitchell.
Robert E. Lee High School in San Antonio came up with a compromise in 2018, changing its name to Legacy of Educational Excellence or L.E.E.
Sidney Lanier
In the San Francisco Bay Area, Haight Elementary (pronounced like “hate”) in Alameda came under fire because it’s named after a California governor named Henry Haight (1867-71) who opposed letting African- and Asian-Americans vote.
In 2019, 31 staff members signed a letter to the superintendent calling the proposed new name “cringe-inducing,” reported the East Bay Times. “It sounds . . . like a fly-by-night charter school or, even more embarrassingly, like an institute that would sponsor a Kinsey study,” the Jan. 21 letter says. They were overruled by the school board. Haight was turned into Love.