November 12, 1997
NEW ORLEANS — By the reckoning of John Riley, the historian at Mount Vernon,
there are about 450 schools in the United States named for George Washington.
Now there is one less.
Following a policy that prohibits school names honoring “former slave owners or
others who did not respect equal opportunity for all,” the Orleans Parish School
Board voted unanimously on Oct. 27 to change the name of George Washington
Elementary to Dr. Charles Richard Drew Elementary. The new name pays tribute to
a black surgeon (1904-1950) known for developing methods to preserve blood
plasma and for protesting the Army’s practice of segregating donated blood by
race.
The renaming of the 74-year-old school in the city’s Bywater neighborhood, the
22d such name change in New Orleans in five years, is the latest milestone in a
concerted effort by blacks across the South to assert their vision of a biracial
history that has traditionally been defined only by whites.
Since the school board’s policy was adopted in December 1992, New Orleans
schools have purged the names of Confederate generals, slave-owning governors
and even the black founder of an orphanage who, like Washington, happened to own
slaves. A school once named for Robert E. Lee, for instance, is now named for
Ronald McNair, a black astronaut killed in the Challenger explosion in 1986.
But never before, either here or apparently elsewhere in the country, has a
school shed the name of a figure as central to the national identity as
Washington. And that has raised questions about whether efforts to broaden
history, if taken too far, may sometimes distort it as well.
Opponents of the decision, and there have not been many in this city in which
blacks are in the majority, argue that it does not account for the totality of
Washington’s achievements or the mores of his times. But in a school district
where 91 percent of the students are black, and where the school board is
controlled by a 5-to-2 black majority, the decision underscores the maxim that
history is written by those with the power.
“Why should African-Americans want their kids to pay respect or pay homage to
someone who enslaved their ancestors?” asked Carl Galmon, a longtime civil
rights leader in New Orleans who has led the campaign to change school names.
“This was the most degrading thing that ever happened in North America, and
Washington was a part of it. To African-Americans, George Washington has about
as much meaning as David Duke.”
Those on the other side of the debate contend that by the standards of the day,
Washington was moderate on slavery, pointing out that he provided for the
emancipation of his slaves after his death.
“What I find objectionable,” said William B. Gwyn, a retired professor of
political science at Tulane University here, “is the rather unhistorical
approach to changing these names, that anyone who ever owned slaves is to be
dishonored by the New Orleans school board without looking at the circumstances
with which the slaves were held. The fact is that with Washington, he opposed
the institution and ultimately freed his slaves.”
Although Washington inherited his first 10 slaves at the age of 11 and died with
316 slaves on his Virginia plantation, his private letters make it clear that he
favored a gradual abolition of slavery — “by slow, sure and imperceptible
degrees,” Washington wrote in 1786.
As president, however, Washington never proposed emancipation. “I think that, to
him, union came first,” said Riley, the historian, “and if making a public stand
on slavery as president of the United States was going to fracture that union,
he was going to keep his mouth shut.”
When Washington died in 1799, his will called for the 125 slaves that he owned
outright to be freed upon the death of his wife. The rest of the slaves at Mount
Vernon belonged to Martha Washington before her marriage to Washington or were
the offspring of unions between the two sets of slaves, Riley said. She
emancipated her husband’s 125 slaves about a year after his death.
The notion that any slave owner could be moderate on the issue of slavery
strikes some blacks in New Orleans as ludicrous. “It’s a huge thing to be owned
by somebody, no matter how much they may have accomplished in other areas,” said
Jeremiah Blount, a black fifth-grade teacher at the newly named Drew Elementary
School. “And now we’re teaching kids who are descendants of the people who would
have been his property.”
By Galmon’s count, 49 of the 121 schools in Orleans Parish were named for slave
owners at the time the school board policy took effect five years ago. While the
policy states that the school board opposes retaining such names, it leaves it
to school communities to initiate the name-change process.
The process at Washington, where 98 percent of the 702 students are black, was
typical. When a new principal, Lee Caston, arrived in 1996, he learned of the
school board policy and raised the issue at a faculty meeting. A committee of
faculty and staff was formed and decided that the policy left them little choice
but to change the school’s name, a decision that Caston believes is
overwhelmingly supported in the community.
With the help of students and parents, choices for a new name were studied and
narrowed to three: Charles Drew, Bywater, and St. Claude, the name of the avenue
that runs by the school. Parents and staff members were then polled and 52
percent voted to change the name to Drew (in secondary schools, students also
are allowed to vote). The majority vote forwarded the recommendation to the
school board, which approved the new name.
Both Caston, the principal, and Linda J. Stelly, an associate superintendent of
the Orleans Parish schools, said there was virtually no opposition to removing
Washington’s name from the three-story, brown-brick school. Ms. Stelly said the
school board felt it was important to be consistent about its policy, which
makes no allowances for slave owners, regardless of their historical stature.
At Drew Elementary, where the words Washington School are etched into the stone
facade, students and staff members are struggling to get comfortable with their
new identity. Receptionists still catch themselves answering the telephones
Washington Elementary. First-graders at morning assembly have not quite learned
to substitute Charles Drew for George Washington in the school song.
Caston has planned an additional change to reinforce the transition. The school
colors, formerly red, white and blue, will be changed to red and blue, symbolic,
he said, of the oxygenated and deoxygenated blood associated with Charles Drew.
Copyright 1997 The New York Times Company
