A question for people in the South. [View all]

[pnwmom]

Last edited Tue Oct 29, 2013, 11:12 PM - Edit history (2)

My relatives live in a Southern city where two of the high schools are named after Confederate war generals -- and one of the school's nicknames' is "the Rebels." It's hard for me to believe that doesn't say something about the city and the people who go along with keeping those names. How do African American students feel about attending those schools? Is there some worthwhile goal achieved by celebrating those names?

What's the liberal rationalization for continuing to name schools and other public buildings after the generals who led the fight for slavery and against the Union? (One of these schools was built in the 1970's; I don't know about the other.)

My relatives don't have an answer for this. Does anyone?

This is from an article about naming schools -- specifically about naming them after Martin Luther King.


http://web.utk.edu/~dalderma/mlkstreet/mlkschools_urbangeog.pdf

SCHOOL NAMES AS CULTURAL ARENAS: THE NAMING OF U.S. PUBLIC SCHOOLS AFTER MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR.1

Derek H. Alderman2 Department of Geography East Carolina University
Schools play an important role in shaping the collective memory and historical identity of their students and the attendant community. While accomplished directly through school curriculum development and the teaching of history per se, student conceptions of the past are also shaped indirectly through the commemorative activities and symbols woven into the everyday fabric of the school (e.g., school holidays, programs, bulletin boards). The naming of schools after historical figures is a subtle yet powerful way of communicating “the accomplishments of previous generations” and defining a set of folk heroes (Goldstein, 1978, p. 119). By merging history and the physical environment, place names and other spatial commemorations work to reify certain visions of the past, giving them legitimacy and identification with the natural order of things (Azarayahu, 1996).