The Dallas Independent School District has plans to change up to 24 school names with connections to slavery or the Confederacy, according to the Dallas Morning News. The district has compiled a list of problematic names they’ve placed under review, a list that, expansive as it is, could be even more compendious.
Four schools are slated for definite renaming, ones that bear the names of Confederate flag officers. No surprise there. And there are other figures on the list, such as Sam Houston and Alamo defender William B. Travis, who owned slaves. Fine.
But then things start to get a little more contentious. Up for review are schools named after politicians such as James Hogg, a Texas governor after Reconstruction, when civil rights weren’t what they should have been. But if that’s the standard, then Franklin Roosevelt High School in Dallas’s Oak Cliff neighborhood needs a name-change, as FDR was happy to collect electoral votes from the Jim Crow South (and let’s not even mention the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII).
Dallas officials may also want to change the name of Oliver Wendell Holmes Middle School. Its namesake, after all, wrote the opinion of the 1927 Supreme Court case Buck v. Bell, which upheld forced sterilization for the mentally handicapped. In Holmes’s words, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
Shockingly, there are as yet no plans to rechristen the César Chávez Learning Center in Old East Dallas. Shocking, given the anti-immigrant sentiments of César Chávez—he referred to strike-breaking immigrants as “wetbacks.” For shame.
Of course, W. H. Gaston Middle School is on the list of likely name-changes given that Gaston was a Confederate captain. But what about Samuel Clemens? He too took up arms for the Confederacy. Never mind that he deserted the militia after just two weeks of drills, clearly the Mark Twain Fundamental Vanguard school needs renaming (and not, we should note, just the “Mark Twain” part).
If these suggestions seem fanciful and overwrought, they are nothing compared to what the school district is actually worked up over: Benjamin Franklin is on their list of problematic names. Internationally renowned as the genius of his age, Franklin did briefly, and early in his life, own slaves. But he soon renounced the practice and became an active and outspoken abolitionist and preacher of racial equality. He petitioned Congress to end slavery, arguing that “equal liberty” is the “Birthright of of all men.” If Franklin—president of the first abolition society in America—can’t be admired, who can?
