Reply to Removing and Renaming Confederate Statues, Schools, Streets, etc: Why?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t have an issue  with confederate names going away. I do have an issue with them writing over presidents names. Who are we going to cancel next? MLK was a womanizer and he gets a whole holiday. I think we should understand the past not rewrite it.

And Justice high school sounds like a juvenile detention center. [/quote]

Because sleeping around is the same as owning other people... :roll: [/quote]

Uh, seems like it wasn’t just “sleeping around.”[/quote]

You are equating slavery of millions to...sex?  
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The allegation was that he witnessed a rape and did nothing, not just that he was a serial adulterer.  It may have been a fabricated claim, but it is documented in files in the National Archives.

So maybe no schools should be named after individuals, given their flaws. [/quote]

Seems extreme to equate one personal mistake to...killing 600k Americans because you want to enslave 4 million people.

But I'm OK naming schools without reference to people or (in Virginia) plantations. Number system would be fine.

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Sounds like plenty more than “one personal mistake” there. [/quote]

I’m sorry. Are you still trying to equate anything shady MLK may have done with killing 600k Americans to keep 4 million people enslaved? 
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Of course not. But Woodrow Wilson shouldnt be equated with that either.  And yet his name has been stripped from what is supposed to be DC’s best high school.[/quote]

Wilson segregated the federal workforce. He was a bigot.

The high school was built in an area that had been called Reno City. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reno_(Washington%2C_D.C.) . After the Civil War it was a Black community, but it was "cleared" by the federal government and the Black residents were ejected in 1929.  The high school was built 13 years after Wilson left office, the memory of what he had done was still very fresh, he was as recent as George W. Bush is today. Naming the school for Wilson was a deliberate provocation to the Black community that had been removed.

Imagine if a Muslim neighborhood were cleared and then a school was built there and named for George W. Bush. [/quote]

History is more complicated than you write.  Wilson grew up in the segregated South and he was prejudiced, as were most white Americans if his time.  But his actions to strengthen segregation in the federal civil service were the result of a deal with Southern conservatives to pass progressive legislation.  I never voted for George W. Bush but I recall that one of his - and America’s finest moments - was when right after 9/11 Bush visited a mosque to emphasize that bigotry and retaliation against Muslims is iin-American.[/quote]

He also intensified segregation throughout DC as the Federal City.  If you’re suggesting that this was just peachy because “progressive “ legislation— presumably useful to random white people — was passed, my four long-deceased grandparents, who all lived in DC around that time, would like a word with you. 
I’m reading this as :political expediency is justified— even if it hurts individuals and cripples communities, ‘cause: “complicated”.  
I’d welcome a clarification if my take on this is incorrect.
DP

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