cheka.
15th January 2016, 07:29 PM
one of their latest successes - note the work to ID every monument, school, park, etc nationwide......add the community organizer group that was there to see houston school names' demise
http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/4-Houston-schools-with-Confederate-names-to-get-6761057.php
HOUSTON (AP) — Texas' largest school district has joined the national debate over whether communities should cut their ties to the Confederacy by renaming buildings or removing monuments.
The Houston Independent School District board voted 5-4 on Thursday night to rename four campuses named after Robert E. Lee or others linked to the Confederacy.
The board issued a statement afterward saying the decision was made "in order to represent the values and diversity of the school district," which has about 215,000 students at 283 schools.
Robert E. Lee High School plus three middle schools — Henry Grady, Richard Dowling and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson — will get new names to be proposed by a committee from each campus. Four other schools that had also been on the name change list were pulled to allow trustees time to discuss the issue with communities from those campuses.
During Thursday's Houston school board meeting, the discussion stayed mainly calm, with most of the people who spoke during a nearly 80-minute public comment period saying they were against the name change.
"I think it's important to realize that even before Charleston, we had some pretty highly publicized incidents of African-Americans pushing for changes in the way we as an American society deal with African-American expression and African-American memories and the role of white supremacy in our culture," said Derek Alderman, a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee who last year began a project to map Confederate symbolism nationwide.
The mapping project by Alderman and Russell Weaver, a geographer at Texas State University, has identified at least 872 parks, natural features, schools, streets and other locations in 44 states named after major Confederate leaders.
But Hany Khalil, with Community Voices for Public Education, a Houston group that advocates community-led school reform and which supports the name changes, said school names "should reflect the values we hold dear today."
http://www.chron.com/news/texas/article/4-Houston-schools-with-Confederate-names-to-get-6761057.php
HOUSTON (AP) — Texas' largest school district has joined the national debate over whether communities should cut their ties to the Confederacy by renaming buildings or removing monuments.
The Houston Independent School District board voted 5-4 on Thursday night to rename four campuses named after Robert E. Lee or others linked to the Confederacy.
The board issued a statement afterward saying the decision was made "in order to represent the values and diversity of the school district," which has about 215,000 students at 283 schools.
Robert E. Lee High School plus three middle schools — Henry Grady, Richard Dowling and Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson — will get new names to be proposed by a committee from each campus. Four other schools that had also been on the name change list were pulled to allow trustees time to discuss the issue with communities from those campuses.
During Thursday's Houston school board meeting, the discussion stayed mainly calm, with most of the people who spoke during a nearly 80-minute public comment period saying they were against the name change.
"I think it's important to realize that even before Charleston, we had some pretty highly publicized incidents of African-Americans pushing for changes in the way we as an American society deal with African-American expression and African-American memories and the role of white supremacy in our culture," said Derek Alderman, a professor of geography at the University of Tennessee who last year began a project to map Confederate symbolism nationwide.
The mapping project by Alderman and Russell Weaver, a geographer at Texas State University, has identified at least 872 parks, natural features, schools, streets and other locations in 44 states named after major Confederate leaders.
But Hany Khalil, with Community Voices for Public Education, a Houston group that advocates community-led school reform and which supports the name changes, said school names "should reflect the values we hold dear today."