Lee High School Renaming Issue to Come Before NEISD Board Tonight (TX)

[struggle4progress]

Posted Monday, December 7th 2015 @ 6am

... the issue of whether Confederate General Robert E. Lee is an appropriate person to honor with a high school in his name officially comes up before the North East ISD Board of Education ...

"Tonight will be the first step to see if they will keep the name, change the name, or take no action at all and just discuss the issue," district Communications Director Aubrey Chancellor said.

Lee High School is the highest profile facility in San Antonio to be named after a Confederate figure. The idea of naming places, schools, and erecting statues of those who served the Confederacy was reconsidered nationwide earlier this year after a rebel flag waving white supremecist murdered nine people in a church in Charleston South Carolina ...

http://www.woai.com/articles/woai-local-news-sponsored-by-five-119078/lee-high-school-renaming-issue-to-14179917/

[struggle4progress]

2. It's a local decision, of course. But in 1958 opening a school named after Robert E Lee

was surely intended to express segregationist ideals: Brown v Board was decided in 1954; the Montgomery bus boycott started in 1955 and lasted a year, which included church bombings by white supremacists; Mississippi established its State Sovereignty Commission in 1956; Autherine Lucy was admitted to University of Alabama under court order that same year, but the university promptly expelled her when a mob attacked, chanting Kill her! Kill her! All this and more was national news, and similar material was regularly reported nationally for some years afterwards

Lee did serve for about 15 months in Texas, at Camp Cooper, which roughly speaking is north of Abilene and so over two hundred miles from San Antonio, so his connection to San Antonio is thin at best

The school's current enrollment is 88% minority, and the Lee name might well be offensive to them

There's no shortage of more appropriate people to provide a name for the school