A high school in Jacksonville, Fla., named after the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, will change its name on July 1, the Florida Times-Union reports.
The Duval County School Board voted 7-0 on Dec 16 to change the name of Nathan B Forrest High School. A new name will be voted upon by students and community members in the next few days.
Before the board voted, Superintendent Nikolai Vitti reported the results of a student survey, which received 1,035 responses: 64 percent voted to change the name, while 36 percent voted to keep the name the same. He also reported that a survey of 339 school alumni came out 94 percent in favor of keeping the name.
But, “It is time for Jacksonville to move on,” Mr Vitti was quoted as saying. “I’m not in a position to judge Nathan B Forrest, but undeniably the Nathan B Forrest name has divided this community.”
Some alumni said the decision to change the name would waste money and was a bow to political correctness that would erase part of history for both the South and their school community. “This isn’t going to stop the divide; this is just the beginning,” one woman, who graduated from the high school in the Class of 1970, was quoted as saying. “Fifty schools in Duval County are named after somebody black or white.”
The cost of changing team uniforms, marquees and other items at the school that bear the name will be about $400,000, Mr Vitti estimated.
A little recent history about Nathan Bedford Forrest
Although a portrait of the school’s namesake hanging in a hallway is said to have graffiti calling Mr Forrest “the devil himself,” there’s always more to the story.
“Some people think he was one of the most successful military practitioners of the (Civil War), and say that trumps all else he did later in life,” the New York Times quoted Brian Steel Wills, the director of the Civil War Center at Kennesaw State University in Georgia and a history professor there, as saying. “Others condemn him out of hand as evil incarnate and dismiss him. Of course, he’s far more complex than either extreme.”
His tactics as a general in the war were more along the lines of guerrilla warfare than those of other generals from the South, such as Robert E Lee. He was known to massacre entire troops of black Union soldiers, for instance. But, as a story out of Selma, Ala., shows, where a statue of Gen Forrest was pilfered last year (see here), his founding of an original version of the Ku Klux Klan, despite his utter renouncement of racism later in life, is the spark lighting up all recent controversy.
For example, in deciding to rename a few city parks in March and remove the names of Confederate heroes like Jefferson Davis and Nathan Bedford Forrest, the City Council of Memphis, Tenn., said the names evoked a racist past and were unwelcoming in a city where most of the population is black, according to a report in the New York Times.
People in Memphis brought forth many of the same arguments now being heard in Jacksonville, claiming that important parts of US history are being “obliterated,” according to one Forrest High graduate from 1993 quoted in the Times-Union.
Some perspective
We’re talking about the name on a school here, which has nothing to do with the history of the South. And although Mr Forrest was a great military strategist, the other parts of his story are also true.
I went to a high school named after a business executive who donated enough money to build the school and have it bear his name. His presence in that community is a great part of the history of the United States and of that town, but it wouldn’t bother me one bit to remove his name if we, say, found out he was ripping people off his entire professional life.
Of course, what Mr Forrest did was far worse than a few crimes involving money would have been. Still, naming schools after people seems to be a practice fraught with peril. I have always been somewhat against the practice in general, and I think the choices for Forrest High’s new names—West Side High or Firestone High (after the street it’s on)—will be more appropriate.
That still doesn’t answer the real concern I have here. I believe all this debate about the name of the school detracts from more important discussions about how kids at the school are being educated. It deflects media and public attention away from what’s happening with students at the school and more toward the board room and superintendent’s office. We need to focus and spend our tax dollars on what really matters, and removing names from schools might be a good start.
