The decision process was a joke. The committee’s research seems to have consisted mostly of cursory Google searches, and the sources cited were primarily Wikipedia entries or similar. Historians were not consulted. Embarrassing errors of interpretation were made, as well as rudimentary factual errors. Robert Louis Stevenson, perhaps the most beloved literary figure in the city’s history, was canceled because in a poem titled “Foreign Children” in his famous collection
A Child’s Garden of Verses, he used the rhyming word
Japanee for Japanese. Paul Revere Elementary School ended up on the renaming list because, during the discussion, a committee member misread a History.com article as claiming that Revere had taken part in an expedition that stole the lands of the Penobscot Indians. In fact, the article described Revere’s role in the Penobscot Expedition, a disastrous American military campaign against the British during the Revolutionary War. (That expedition was named after a bay in Maine.) But no one bothered to check, the committee voted to rename the school, and by order of the San Francisco school board Paul Revere will now ride into oblivion.
The committee also failed to consistently apply its one-strike-and-you’re-out rule. When one member questioned whether Malcolm X Academy should be renamed in light of the fact that
Malcolm was once a pimp, and therefore subjugated women, the committee decided that his later career redeemed his earlier missteps. Yet no such exceptions were made for Lincoln, Jefferson, and others on the list.
In its rush to sweep historical evildoers off the stage, the committee erased much of San Francisco and California’s Hispanic heritage. Not just Father Junípero Serra, the spiritual head of Spain’s colonizing expedition, but also José Ortega, who as a member of the Portolá expedition discovered San Francisco Bay, and other Spanish- and Mexican-era figures, had their names removed from schools because they engaged in or were associated with actions that harmed Native Americans. No one disputes that every colonizing group in California, from the Spanish to the Mexicans to the Americans (who engaged in actual genocide), had a dreadful record with Native peoples. But for all its supposed ethnic sensitivity, the committee seems not to have been concerned about removing Latin figures.
Mythical entities also fell under the fatal gaze of the Purity Police. El Dorado Elementary, named after a fantastical kingdom whose fame circulated among Spanish explorers in the early 16th century and whose Goldfinger-like ruler was allegedly ceremonially covered by his subjects with gold dust, also made the list. Citing the death of Native peoples that resulted from the Gold Rush, the
San Francisco Chronicle reported that a committee member
said, “I don’t think the concept of greed and lust for gold is a concept we want our children to be given”—an idealistic, if possibly futile, position in a city whose median household income exceeds $100,000.
The possibility that judging past figures by the standards of the present is both untenable and ethically suspect did not, apparently, occur to the committee. Nor did the committee decide that the towering achievements of Lincoln or Washington or Jefferson might just outweigh their shortcomings. It defended its crusade as part of America’s racial reckoning. As the committee chair, the first-grade teacher Jeremiah Jeffries,
said, “This is important work. We’re in the middle of a reckoning as a country and a nation. We need to do our part.”
The board’s vote drew the ire of Mayor London Breed, who blasted the committee for wasting resources on such an exercise instead of trying to reopen the public schools. “Let’s bring the same urgency and focus on getting our kids back in the classroom, and then we can have that longer conversation about the future of school names,” she
tweeted.
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…..for 1979.
