Posted on 12/20/2003 5:17:34 PM PST by Non-Sequitur
In the parking lot of Jefferson Davis Middle School, a civil war of words is being waged over a petition drive to erase the name of the slave-owning Confederate president from the school.
Opinion is mixed, and it's not necessarily along racial lines.
"What are they going to name it, Allen Iverson Middle School?" asks an eighth-grader, who is black and says she doesn't pay much mind to the petition effort, which she and her mother call ridiculous.
Iverson, the spectacularly talented NBA player who has a knack for attracting trouble, attended Jeff Davis.
Cam Hanson, waiting for his two kids in the family van, says erasing the Davis name would not bother him, provided the new name doesn't offend.
"Like naming it after Allen Iverson. That's offensive to me," says Hanson, who is white.
It is difficult to say how many public schools in the 11 former Confederate states are named for Civil War leaders from the South. Among the more notable names, the National Center for Education Services lists 19 Robert E. Lees, nine Stonewall Jacksons and five Davises. There are many more — J.E.B. Stuart, Turner Ashby, George Edward Pickett — with at least one school bearing their name.
For some, these men who defended a system that allowed slavery should not be memorialized on public schools where thousands of black children are educated.
"If it had been up to Robert E. Lee, these kids wouldn't be going to school as they are today," said civil rights leader Julian Bond, now a history professor at the University of Virginia. "They can't help but wonder about honoring a man who wanted to keep them in servitude."
That argument isn't accepted universally among Southern black educators, including the school superintendent in Petersburg, where about 80 percent of the 36,000 residents are black. Three schools carry the names of Confederates.
"It's not the name on the outside of the building that negatively affects the attitudes of the students inside," Superintendent Lloyd Hamlin said. "If the attitudes outside of the building are acceptable, then the name is immaterial."
The symbols and the names of the Confederacy remain powerful reminders of the South's history of slavery and the war to end it. States, communities and institutions continue to debate what is a proper display of that heritage and what amounts to iconography.
Students in South Carolina have been punished for wearing Confederate flag T-shirts to school; Clarksdale, Miss., permanently lowered the state flag, which has a Confederate emblem in one corner, to recognize "the pain and suffering it has symbolized for many years;" and the Richmond-area Boy Scouts dropped Lee's name from its council this year.
In the most sweeping change, the Orleans Parish School Board in Louisiana gave new names to schools once named for dead patriots and historical figures who owned slaves. George Washington Elementary School was renamed for Dr. Charles Richard Drew, a black surgeon who organized blood banks during World War II.
In Gadsden, Ala., however, officials have resisted efforts to rename a middle school named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early backer of the Ku Klux Klan; while a school board in Kentucky adopted a new dress code that eliminates bans on provocative symbols including the Confederate flag.
The naming of schools after Confederate figures is particularly rich with symbolism because of the South's slow move to integrate. Many schools were named after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954 but before white flight left many inner city schools majority black.
"Now whites are complaining that they are changing the name of Stonewall Jackson High School," says Fitzhugh Brundage, a University of North Carolina history professor who is writing a book on "black and white memory from the Civil War."
While far from always the case, the naming of some public schools after Confederate generals was a parting shot to blacks emerging from segregated schools.
"It was an attempt to blend the past with the present but holding onto a romanticized past," Jennings Wagoner, a U.Va. scholar on the history of education, said of the practice of naming schools after Lee, Jackson and others. "It was also a time of extreme racism."
Erenestine Harrison, who launched the petition drive to rename Jefferson Davis Middle School, attended Hampton's segregated public schools. She moved north in 1967 and was struck by the school names upon her return seven years ago to Hampton, a city at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Educated as a psychologist, she has worked in the city schools as a substitute teacher.
"If I were a kid, especially a teenager, I would be ashamed to tell a friend that I went to Jefferson Davis," said Harrison, 55. "Basically, those guys fought for slavery."
Harrison said plenty of battlefields and statues sustain Confederate heritage without the schools celebrating the segregated past.
"Of course we can argue over the whole history (of the Civil War) but the end result would be black people would have continued to be in slavery," she said.
Henry Kidd, former Virginia commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, sees efforts by Harrison and others as a "chipping away, piece by piece, at our history." Like many defenders of the Confederacy, he views the Civil War as a fight over states' rights and economics.
"The causes of the war had nothing to do with slavery," Kidd said. "The founders of our country — Thomas Jefferson and George Washington — were slave owners. We know today they were wrong but at that time that was the belief."
Time is taking care of some of the naming debates as schools built in the mid-50s and 60s are replaced by newer buildings.
"Many new schools are being named for African-American or civil rights leaders," said William G. Thomas, a Southern historian and director of the Virginia Center for Digital History at U.Va. "Across the South, the energy has gone into naming new schools."
Even Harrison dropped an effort to rename Robert E. Lee Elementary in Hampton after learning that he was reluctant to battle the North and did not own slaves.
Back at Davis Middle School, the parent of the 8th-grader finds "poetic justice" in her bright young daughter excelling at a school named after a slave owner and where two of three students are black.
"He must be rolling his grave to see so many smart young African-American students," she said of Davis.
You're missing the point. These renamings are exercises in the new pietism......when they aren't the realization of black racism. Renaming a school named for George Washington, after someone else, just because the someone else was black? Pure-dimensional racial chauvinism, larded with vindictiveness. How can anyone call it anything else?
As for the New Orleans School Board, those people down there have been doctrinaire black racists for years. A columnist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune and States-Item named Iris Kelso, a longtime political observer since the salad days of the Long machine, made the observation 20 years ago that no white person was electable to citywide public office in the City of New Orleans. A few years ago, they purged Congresswoman Lindy Boggs, a down-the-line liberal who'd done black voters' bidding in the Louisiana Second District for a generation, just because she was white. As an otherwise distinguished black preacher and NAACP nabob explained to her in the meeting, it was "time for one of our own". More recently, Mayor Marc Morial pulled strings high and low, busing "voters" from the infamous New Orleans housing projects to the polls to defeat the last white person on the city council, a woman who'd tried to stand up for fiscal responsibility and basic honesty in the way the city did business. They beat her, then celebrated afterwards.
The biggest racists in the South ain't the Klan, guys.
Robert E. Lee High School in Houston is no more. Some carpetbagger/PC teachers at Lee got together and asked the Houston Independent School District to change the name to something more PC a couple of years ago........something reflecting its new student body of illegal aliens, legal aliens, blacks, people from Mars and Alpha Centauri, and something like 3% white students.
Confederate House Restaurant in Houston was sold by the founder's family, and the Italian-American buyers changed the name after a PC/cultural-imperialist corporate executive complained that he'd love to bring his corporate board to the restaurant for lunch, but.......
Yeah, right.
LOL -- she'll have to change her name something like Sheila X-X. She'll be a "double Muslim"!
Come to think of it, her first name is Irish for "girl"......that's gotta go, too!
Alas, billbears, the truth is often quite different from the facts. Jackson did not start the school. The school, sponsored by the Presbyterian Church in Lexington, existed before Jackson arrived and continued after he went to war. Jackson did not teach slaves to read. He did require the slaves that he owned to attend. As to 'birthing three black churches', I suppose that the Black Codes following the war had as much to do with that as did Jackson. Nice myth though.
"There are few, I believe, in this enlightened age, who will not acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil. It is idle to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it is a greater evil to the white than to the colored race."---Robert E. Lee
Please continue the quote, billbears. "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, physically, and socially. The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things. How long their servitude may be necessary is known and ordered by a merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild and melting influences of Christianity than from the storm and tempest of fiery controversy. This influence, though slow, is sure. The doctrines and miracles of our Saviour have required nearly two thousand years to convert but a small portion of the human race, and even among Christian nations what gross errors still exist! While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day." In other words, leave things as they are and let God sort it out.
Better to name them after men like Sherman, Grant, and the other guy. Lord knows their love for people of other races is well documented.
Better documented than either of the gentlemen you mentioned.
Jefferson Davis believed in slavery till the day he died, profited from it, and never freed a single slave in his life.
Like the 'myth' of the Black Codes before the war in the north? For some reason I can't seem to find any quotes from the three saints of the north opposing these black codes....
Please continue the quote, billbears.
I saw nothing contradicted in the second part of the quote from the first.
The painful discipline they are undergoing is necessary for their further instruction as a race, and will prepare them, I hope, for better things.
Much better a wish for the black race than ol 'root, pig, or perish' eh?
While we see the course of the final abolition of human slavery is still onward, and give it the aid of our prayers, let us leave the progress as well as the results in the hands of Him who, chooses to work by slow influences, and with whom a thousand years are but as a single day
Not at all out of line from the teachings of a fundamentalist or Christian church. God allows the sun to shine on the evil as well as the godly. And His will always will trump the will of men. As it did peacefully throughout the Western Hemisphere in the decades prior. Of course there will always be those men that rely on their own horses and chariots so to speak. And those ways lead to 600,000+ dead.
Better documented than either of the gentlemen you mentioned.
Oh do, tell
Sherman himself certainly did not believe that "each man is as good as another." For example, in 1862 Sherman was bothered that "the country" was "swarming with dishonest Jews" (see Michael Fellman, Citizen Sherman, p. 153). He got his close friend, General Grant, to expel all Jews from his army. As Fellman writes, "On December 17, 1862, Grant . . . , like a medieval monarch . . . expelled ‘The Jews, as a class,’ from his department." Sherman biographer Fellman further writes that to Sherman, the Jews were "like n*ggers" and "like greasers (Mexicans) or Indians" in that they were "classes or races permanently inferior to his own."Interesting thing about that. 'while they do remain together'. Wonder what ol' abe was thinking. Perhaps could it be in reference to his colonization plan?General Ulysses Grant's slaves had to await the Thirteenth Amendment for freedom. When asked why he didn't free his slaves earlier, General Grant said, "Good help is so hard to come by these days."--Black Confederate Soldiers, Walter Williams
"I will say, then, that I am not nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way, the social and political equality of the white and black races; that I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters of the free negroes, or jurors, or qualifying them to hold office, or having them to marry white people. I will say in addition, that there is a physical difference between the white and black races, which, I suppose, will forever forbid the two races living together upon terms of social and political equality, and inasmuch as they cannot so live, that while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, that I as much as any other man am in favor of the superior position being assigned to the white man."--Speeches and Writings 1832-1858
Lincoln is thought of as the Great Emancipator, but he thought of the African race as one that was inferior and unsuitable to live in a while society. Because he did not successfully carry out his plan of black colonization, it is rather easy to skip that section of his history. However, even only days prior to his assassination, he asked General Benjamin F. Butler to study the possibility of shipping the blacks to another location. Even after the failure of earlier attempts, Lincoln still desired the separation of the white and black races. During a speech at Cincinnati in September of 1859, Lincoln stated that "there is room enough for us all to be free," but he wished the blacks to live freely on another land mass.—[From Earnest Sevier Cox, Lincoln's Negro]
Nice guy. Wonder if Julian Bond wants to raise another monument to him?
Like maybe naming the school after ANY sports figure is offensive, regardless of race. But the author jumped on the chance to note the race of these people.
Sports figures get too much attention anyway. Most of them would be flipping burgers if they couldn't throw a ball or run fast.
Amazing you pen that, because it had crossed my mind how man's impatience with God not working within what we often view as "a limited time opportunity" ALWAYS WITHOUT FAIL costs us more dearly than we would to wait. I believe the quote is "in the time of life" as was told to Abraham. Look what his impatience with God has cost him and his descendants.
Regards,
Az
hmmmmm....public educations. nuff said
And I'm unaware of any of the former leaders of the confederacy who opposed the southern Black Codes. So...does that mean that they were no better than Lincoln, Grant and Sherman? Or does that mean Lincoln, Grant, and Sherman where just as tolerant as the former leaders of the confederacy?
Much better a wish for the black race than ol 'root, pig, or perish' eh?
If you consider supporting slavery for another 10 or 100 or 1000 years as better. Lee was happy to have it go on as long as God willed it to, and God didn't seem to have a timeline.
Oh do, tell...
Yeah. I'm unaware of any quote from any suthern leader that would indicate that they believed the black man was the equal of a white man in any way or entitled to the same rights. Perhaps you can enlighten us?
No, not really.
"What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction, a deep conviction on the part of Georgia, that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery." -- Speech of Henry Benning to the Virginia Secession Convention
what we southrons need is an end to the STUPID, south-HATING, ignorant,arrogant anti-dixie forces in the public schools AND a return to traditional education with dixie textbooks.
if that means throwing out the baby with the bathwater, so be it.
free dixie NOW,sw
"If it had been up to Robert E. Lee, these kids wouldn't be going to school as they are today,"
Oh,,,,,crap!
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