A PUBLIC school in Mississippi is to drop the name of the Civil War leader of the pro-slavery South, and be named after the first black US president, Barack Obama, the local newspaper reported.
The move in Jackson, Mississippi, comes amid a national debate over a campaign to remove statues and other monuments to generals and leaders of the 1861-1865 Confederacy.
The Clarion-Ledger said Davis International Baccalaureate Elementary School, whose enrollment is 98% black, will be renamed Barack Obama Magnet International Baccalaureate Elementary School next year.
Janelle Jefferson, head of the parent-teacher association, informed the Jackson school board of the plan to rename the school at a meeting on Tuesday evening, the newspaper said.
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She said the school community had voted to rename the school “to reflect a person who fully represents ideals and public stances consistent with what we want our children to believe about themselves”.
According to the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights advocacy group, more than 100 public schools in the US, primarily in the South, are named for Confederate icons.
A protest against the removal of a Confederate statue turned deadly in August when an avowed white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, killing a woman.
White nationalists and neo-Nazis had staged a rally in the city to oppose the planned removal from a public park of a statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, the Civil War commander of the Army of Northern Virginia. – AFP, October 19, 2017.
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