A Mississippi elementary school originally named after US Confederate President Jefferson Davis will be renamed after former President Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the United States.
The school, 98% of whose student body is African-American, was named Davis IB Elementary School in honour of Mississippian Jefferson Davis, who served as the unrecognised "President" of the 11 southern states who announced their secession from the US in 1861 in order to preserve the institution of slavery from northern abolitionists. Approximately 620,000 soldiers died in the civil war that followed, along with the South’s hopes of maintaining a slave-holding society.
The decision to rename the school to Barack Obama Magnet IB was announced Tuesday after a months-long effort by parents to strip the Confederate leader’s name from the school and instead honor the nation's first black president, Newsweek reported.
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“Jefferson Davis, although infamous in his own right, would probably not be too happy about a diverse school promoting the education of the very individuals he fought to keep enslaved being named after him,” Davis Magnet IB PTA President Janelle Jefferson said at the Jackson School Board meeting Tuesday.
Jefferson said the whole community was behind renaming the school “to reflect a person who fully represents ideals and public stances consistent with what we want our children to believe about themselves,” the Clarion-Ledger reported. The majority of the students enrolled at the school were born during Obama’s eight years in office as President.
Officials say the name change will be put into effect next year. Community leaders are still trying to rename two other local schools: George Elementary, named after Confederate Brigadier General James Zachariah George - author of a postwar state constitution that denied voting rights for black citizens - and Lee Elementary, named after Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
The Southern Poverty Law Center found that 109 American schools are named after Confederate leaders. Of the 109 schools, 27 have a majority of African-American students and 39 were built between the 1950s and 1970s, the height of the civil rights era for African-Americans. Many of the schools are in southern states - but not all. Washington and Oklahoma, two states that didn’t exist during the Civil War, also have schools named to honour the Confederacy.
The place of Confederate symbolism and monuments and schools named after Confederate leaders has been a subject of controversy in recent years. In 2015, after white supremacist Dylann Roof murdered nine black worshippers in a South Carolina church, several pictures emerged of the shooter with Confederate flags, prompting some southern states, including Alabama, Virginia and Tennessee, to removed Confederate flag symbols from their state license plates.
In 2015, California lawmaker Lorena Gonzalez successfully urged the San Diego Unified School District to rename a San Diego school honoring Robert E. Lee.
“The flag in particular, and anyone associated with this army, in general, have been associated with intolerance, racism and hate, none of which have a place in our schools,” Gonzalez wrote in a 2015 letter, The Washington Post reported.
Earlier this year, a violent white supremacist rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia to protest the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee resulted in three deaths and brought attention back to the remaining monuments and schools named after Confederate heroes
After the rally, President Donald Trump said that removing Confederate memorials is equivalent to “changing history” and “changing culture”.
"So, this week it's Robert E. Lee," Trump said. "I notice that Stonewall Jackson is coming down. I wonder is it George Washington next week, and is it Thomas Jefferson the week after? You know, you really do have to ask yourself, where does it stop?"
People took to social media to celebrate the news that Davis Elementary would soon become Barack Obama Elementary:
Although some of the former president's detractors criticised the decision:
The Davis Elementary Parent-Teacher Association will carry out fundraising campaigns to pay for new signs, stationery, and equipment needed for the name change, CBS reported.
