The names of Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and other prominent figures, including California Senator Dianne Feinstein, will be removed from 44 San Francisco public schools, a move that sparked Wednesday as to whether the famed liberal city will meet the national has taken America’s racist past too far. .
The decision by the San Francisco Board of Education in a 6-1 vote Tuesday night affects one-third of the city’s schools and came nearly three years after the board began considering the idea. The adopted resolution calls for the removal of names honoring historical figures with direct or broad links to slavery, oppression, racism or the “subjugation” of people.
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 primary school Dianne Feinstein, named after the Democratic senator and former mayor of San Francisco, raises eyebrows. The seminal 87-year-old’s star has been dim in recent years, with horrified liberals joining her retirement last year after hugging Republican Senator Lindsey Graham at the end of heated hearings before US Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett.
Feinstein’s spokesman Tom Mentzer said the senator had no comment.
The committee that selected the names put Feinstein on the list because, as mayor, in 1984 she replaced a wrecked Confederate flag that was part of a long-standing flag display for City Hall. When the flag was taken down a second time, she did not put it back.
“I want to make sure that people don’t cancel or erase this history in any way,” said Gabriela Lopez, chairman of San Francisco’s Board of Education, who specifically commented on Feinstein and the wider group. “But it does shift from upholding and honoring them, and these opportunities are a great way to have that conversation about our past and have the chance 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 wider “racist symbols and white supremacist culture that we see in our country.”
The brush stroke was too broad for some San Francisco parents.
“This is a bit of a joke. It’s almost a parody of leftist activism,” said Gerald Kanapathy, a father of two young children, including a kindergarten teacher at a San Francisco school who is not on the list.
“I don’t mind that some schools should be renamed. There are many questionable choices,” he said. “But they kind of decided and pushed it through 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 made the decision without consulting experts and the wider school community.
“We think it is very important that the community at large is involved in figuring out who should get the name of public schools,” said Seeyew Mo, the group’s director.
“We would like to have historical experts to provide historical context as we evaluate people from the past with today’s sensitivities,” he said.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who is black, called the move ill-timed given the coronavirus pandemic that has kept the city’s schools closed since March.
“Our students are suffering, and we should be talking about getting them into classrooms, getting mental health support, and giving them the resources they need in these challenging times,” Breed said, adding that they are discussing the issue. supports renaming of schools, but believes it should include parents, students and others and take place when classrooms reopen.
The renaming process was led by a committee created in 2018 to study the names of district schools amid a national reckoning of racial injustice that followed a deadly clash at a white racist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The committee was asked to identify schools named after people who were slave owners or associated with slavery, colonization, exploitation of workers or others, and anyone who oppressed women, children, gays or transgender people. They also tried to change the names of schools that honored anyone involved in human rights or environmental abuses or who believed racist or white supremacy.
Lopez said the schools have until April to propose new names, which the board will vote on, and that the actual renaming “could take a few years.”
Historian Harold Holzer warned of what he called “a danger of excess” if the country takes a wrecking ball into its past.
“I think it is dangerous to apply the moral standards of the 21st century to historical figures from one or two centuries 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 as an enlightened person from 2021.”
Holzer disagrees with Abraham Lincoln High School’s new name, which, according to the San Francisco commission, was due to the treatment of Native Americans during his administration.
In the midst of the Civil War in 1863, Mr. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed slaves in the Confederacy.
“No one deserves more credit for the destruction of slavery,” said Holzer, a Lincoln Scholar and director of Hunter College’s Roosevelt House of Public Policy Institute. “Lincoln is much more liberal than an abuser of racial justice.”