If I don’t like a historic figure, can I simply write a letter to get whatever road, building, bridge or whatever is named after him renamed? It seems to be going that way.<\/p>\n
The Daily Caller<\/a> posted an article yesterday about the mad dash to rename buildings that were named after Civil War Confederate Generals and other dignitaries of the Confederacy<\/a>. This prompted another request.<\/p>\n The article reports:<\/p>\n A history teacher at Woodrow Wilson<\/a> High School in Portland, Ore.<\/a> is lobbying for the school to change its name, reports local CBS affiliate KOIN-TV<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n The teacher, Hyung Nam, has been calling for a new name for Wilson High for several months.<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019d have to be ignorant about history to continue to affiliate ourselves with this man,\u201d the history teacher wrote in an April 22 email to all staffers.<\/strong><\/p>\n …When Wilson was the president of Princeton University<\/a>, he\u00a0steadfastly claimed that no black person had ever or would ever<\/em> apply to the Ivy League school (which now boasts a college named for him<\/a>).<\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cThe whole temper and tradition of the place are such that no Negro has ever applied for admission, and it seems unlikely that the question will ever assume practical form,\u201d the man who would become president in 1913 said.<\/strong><\/p>\n While we are at it, what are we going to do with all those things in West Virginia<\/a> that are named for Senator Robert C. Byrd<\/a>? If you are interested, you can find a list of places in West Virginia named for Senator Byrd here<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2010 The Daily Caller<\/a> said the following about Robert Byrd:<\/p>\n Byrd joined the Klan (Ku Klux Klan<\/a>) at the ripe young age of 24 \u2014 hardly a young\u2019un by today\u2019s standards, much less those of 1944, when Byrd refused to join the military because he might have to serve alongside \u201crace mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds,\u201d according to a letter Byrd wrote to Sen. Theodore Bilbo<\/a> at the height of World War II.<\/strong><\/p>\n My point is this: There are some people and chapters in American history<\/a> that are not pretty. Some of our leaders were racists. However, that was then and this is now. Let’s learn from our past mistakes and move forward. We can’t change the leaders that we elected in the past, but we can pay attention to the views of the leaders we elect in the future. Scrubbing names off of schools, roads, and monuments will not change history. It might even prevent us from being aware of our past mistakes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" If I don’t like a historic figure, can I simply write a letter to get whatever road, building, bridge or whatever is named after him renamed? It seems to be going that way. The Daily Caller posted an article yesterday … Continue reading