The school board in Jacksonville, Florida will decide next week whether to change the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest High School to Firestone High, stripping the name of the Confederate general off the majority African-American school.
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution notes, there’s been a backlash in the South against taking the name of Confederate leaders off of schools. However, Forrest made his fortune as a plantation owner and slave trader; his resume includes a role as an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan.
In 1867, the newly formed Klan elected Forrest its honorary Grand Wizard or national leader, but publicly denied being involved. In 1869, he ordered the Klan to disband because of the members’ increasing violence. Two years later, a congressional investigation concluded his involvement had been limited to his attempt to disband it.
One wonders what Jay Greene would make of this. Jay famously made a study of school names that showed just how controversy-averse school naming has become. He discovered that more schools in Florida were named for manatees than George Washington.
One of the names under consideration for a new elementary school in Rochester, Minnesota is Falcon Ridge Elementary. There are plenty of hawks, owls and turkeys near the new school, but no falcons. There’s really not much of a ridge either, apparently. If you wanted to name the school after local fauna and geographic features, then you might have to go with Turkey Floodplain Elementary, one wag observed.
Such is the difficulty in getting schools named after human beings. As a report by Jay Greene noted last year, there are 11 schools in Florida that honor manatees,while George Washington has five.
Geographic names are non-controversial, even when they’re made up. The other name under consideration is George Gibbs Elementary, in honor of the first African American to set foot on Antarctica and the founder of the local branch of the NAACP. The Rochester school board chose Gibbs the other night, but there will be time for public comment before it’s final.
Here’s a list of 100 names the board started with before narrowing it to Falcon Ridge and George Gibbs. I wonder if Al Gore and Bono (School of Rock, indeed!) are miffed at not making the cut.
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