Renaming Jefferson school.

If Jefferson had pushed his anti-slavery views and had freed his slaves, I expect he wouldn't have been elected President and we would be asking why the school is named after somebody else.  

Personally, I favor renaming the school to P.S. #3.  But there is a discussion to be had as to the point at which a person's misdeeds cancel out anything good they have done.  In the case of, say, Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, the defining acts of his life were to fight to preserve slavery and subsequently to terrorize free Blacks.  So, even though he repented at the end of his life, nothing offsets his defining acts.  The same is not true of Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln (turns out he isn't perfect either).

We want our heroes to be perfect people when the more interesting discussions are about people who do great things but have offsetting misdeeds or unsavory aspects as well.


Tom has a point.  Few if any of us are perfect enough to withstand the sharp eyes of history.  I am not so concerned about what name is given to, or taken away from, a single elementary school in town.  My question is what comes next?  Should we then lobby to change the name of Jefferson Avenue?  What other historic figures who are less than perfect have the same name as that given to one of our streets?  Should we rename the Vietnam Veterans Memorial because that was a bad war?  Should we rename Columbia High School because of the association with Christopher Columbus? Where does it end and what is the point?  I grew up believing that a person's good name was their most valuable possession.  I also grew up knowing that not everything a person does in life is good.  It is important to teach our children that everyone does somethings in their life which are defined as good and other things in their life which are defined as bad.  Let us not rewrite our history to the point where we can no longer learn from it.


I'm in the name changing camp.  I think we should try and find someone, especially in this era of sensitivity to diversity, that children and adults of various races and backgrounds could more universally admire, and not be so controversial.  In spite of many superb contributions, Jefferson was a slaveholder until he died, wrote that blacks were inferior despite his ringing words in the Declaration, and secretly fathered a child with a young slave mistress, while steadfastly denying it.  If I were a black child or parent, I wouldn't want to be part of a school named after such a person.  Surely, there must be a few good men, or women, who would be more admired across the spectrum than someone with Jefferson's severe liabilities.  


For the kids born into slavery on Jefferson’s plantation who were sold into slavery at his death (having been promised freedom) what do you think TJ’s defining act was?  

I think it is this final betrayal above all else that soils the man’s legacy most of all. 


Keep the name but name it after Marshall Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of house music instead.


For the record: John Adams had zero slaves and was elected President before Jefferson.

tjohn said:

If Jefferson had pushed his anti-slavery views and had freed his slaves, I expect he wouldn't have been elected President and we would be asking why the school is named after somebody else.   


joan_crystal said:

Tom has a point. …

History can be written and taught no matter what we name our schools or streets.

“Where does it end?” Wherever we decide it ends, case by case. (If someone or a group wants to rename Columbia High, the effort gets debated and eventually decided. As for streets, Philadelphia right now is debating renaming a street that may or may not have been named after a pro-slavery U.S. chief justice.)

“What is the point?” To reflect our ever evolving understanding of history — what we, as you emphasized, learn from it — and how, or if, we want to honor its figures.

I don’t think anybody expects perfection, so let’s dispense with that false standard. People are weighing the bad against the good of historical figures, and as times and contexts change are finding the balance tipping in a different direction.


ridski said:

Keep the name but name it after Marshall Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of house music instead.

 Or Charles Jefferson from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 


In one sentence, this is what I’m hearing:

We need to learn, teach and keep uncovering our history, but no matter what it tells us, some things should stay etched in stone.


Smedley said:

ridski said:

Keep the name but name it after Marshall Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of house music instead.

 Or Charles Jefferson from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

 That's not even a real person.


steel - Adams did not live on a plantation in the South and had little need for any help. Let's remember other things about Thomas Jefferson. He was principal author of the Declaration of Independence,3rd president,lawyer,diplomat,architect,musician,and philosopher.I am a graduate of Jefferson School as are my 2 sons. We all had a great education back when it was a neighborhood school having grades kindergarten through 6th. The teachers were from many backgrounds including Black, White and Asian. To me history is so important and Thomas Jefferson was one of my favorite presidents. Just loved that beautiful Monticello. Yes, he had slaves but so did all plantation owners back then. I'd like to know who came up with this idea.


galileo said:

steel - Adams did not live on a plantation in the South and had little need for any help. Let's remember other things about Thomas Jefferson. He was principal author of the Declaration of Independence,3rd president,lawyer,diplomat,architect,musician,and philosopher.I am a graduate of Jefferson School as are my 2 sons. We all had a great education back when it was a neighborhood school having grades kindergarten through 6th. The teachers were from many backgrounds including Black, White and Asian. To me history is so important and Thomas Jefferson was one of my favorite presidents. Just loved that beautiful Monticello. Yes, he had slaves but so did all plantation owners back then. I'd like to know who came up with this idea.

 dude, he OWNED PEOPLE


John Gotti also did nice things for his neighbors in Bensonhurst…

I would be cool with the name change to “Ridgewood elementary school”. There was a time not so long ago that Jefferson school had not one single black student. 


galileo said:

Was he the only one?

 are you kidding?


mrmaplewood said:

And three hundred years from now most everyone living now is liable to have their name deleted from usage because they owned a gasoline powered vehicle.  That also would be political correctness applied retroactively.

 It's not going to take three hundred years or even 100 and it's going to be directed to people who murdered and ate animals.


Klinker said:

One can imagine a world in which buildings are not named after people. 

My kids went to South Mountain Elementary and they were unscarred by the experience. 

"South Mountain" is a geographic term used by European settlers, replacing the designation used by the original inhabitants, the Lenape.


galileo said:

Was he the only one?

 Remove each and everyone of them.


In my view Jefferson was a scholar, an intellect, and a visionary architect of buildings and of history...  who also sucked at being a decent human being despite his glowing flourishes with a quill proclaiming virtue in several languages.

As to the issue at hand. If folks want to keep the name of Jefferson over the school doorway for whatever reason it should be agreed that it is worth the debate to examine what ALL of his values were as a person, not only by what he wrote or said to free a nation but by his deeds to exploit people on his own land and under his own roof and in his bed.

He kept his own children in slavery. I was never taught that in school.

Also, John Adams, our second elected President actually HIRED a black couple to run his farm (orchards, crops, livestock) and live in his house while he was away arranging for the country's independence. I was never taught that historical nugget in school as counterpoint to the Virginians either. Teachers were too busy either ignoring the cruel history of slavery altogether or instead mentioned it only in some weird "regrettable inevitable" casual abstract way if they mentioned it at all. Apparently to grouse or harp on it was considered "unpatriotic".

I don't think Jefferson should be erased from history. I think that the chapter on him should be widened so that generations of children should no longer be lied to by the sin of omission.


You could definitely sub in an abolitionist founding father but few of them had the attitudes or track record about race that we find ideal today.   Franklin became head of Philadelphia's abolition society and concluded that perceived black shortcomings were due to their circumstances and mistreatment, not any natural inferiority, but he owned slaves when he was young.   


it's entirely true that we were never really taught in school what the truth was about the atrocity of  slavery.  The brutality, the degree to which rape was an inherent aspect of the domination of enslaved people, was not taught.  The notion that white slave owners took Black women as "mistresses" or "lovers" was what we were taught, even though they were describing women who were considered property and had absolutely no opportunity to give consent of any sort.

if historical figures who did great things were also guilty of owning human beings, and raping them, it's high time we gave second thought to how we memorialize them. Same with someone like Andrew Jackson, who carried out ethnic cleansing.  He should have been off the $20 bill by now.


drummerboy said:

 dude, he OWNED PEOPLE

 

galileo said:

Was he the only one?

 Not a good look for you, my man. 
LOL


I think history's a lot more complicated than good guys and bad guys, and to try to get into whether a particular person's good deeds balance out their bad deeds is to misunderstand human nature and history, IMO. But I also don't think that's actually all that relevant to questions around naming schools. Naming buildings and bridges and roads, putting up statues, etc isn't about history, it's about promoting a society's beliefs and values. And in that context, I think it's absolutely fair game to ask if the cultural promotion infrastructure we have aligns with our beliefs and values. Given that societies are not static, we'd expect that over time the answer will often be "no." And in that case, it's probably time to retire much of that infrastructure and put up new names, statues, etc. And to expect that what we do today will be retired or revised in the future. None of this "erases" history in any sense, and I'd go so far as to say that anyone looking to statues and street names as a way of learning history is almost certainly coming away with a very shallow and misdirected understanding of history.

Jefferson was an important and significant figure in US history, and many of his writings (especially the Declaration) are a substantial and positive contribution to human culture. This is a historical fact. Jefferson was a wealthy landowner who fully and willingly participated in the institutionalized destruction of families, torture, and forced labor of human beings, and who took advantage of his position to repeatedly rape at least one of the women under his power. This is also a historical fact.

What values and beliefs are we hoping to inculcate by naming a building after him? Have the values and beliefs we seek to promote changed since naming the building? Has our understanding of him changed so that his name no longer effectively promotes the values we desire? If so, then I think it seems entirely appropriate to rename the building.

(pardon for the intrusion into "Maplewoood Specific" -- the topic seems of larger interest than purely local. We could probably discuss Washington or T. Roosevelt over here).


ridski said:

Smedley said:

ridski said:

Keep the name but name it after Marshall Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of house music instead.

 Or Charles Jefferson from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

 That's not even a real person.

 Not sure this guy was real:

Chief Tuscan (or Tuskin), who is said to have lived in our valley, was reputedly born a Mohican. The late Maplewood historian Beatrice Herman wrote that according to James Ricalton, the village’s famous schoolmaster, Chief Tuscan had migrated from Upper New York State, and married an Indian maiden, joining the Lenni Lenape and setting up household with her in the ravine along what is now Tuscan Road.

By one account, when Chief Tuscan died in 1801, members of his tribe staged an elaborate funeral ritual, and he was buried in the vicinity of his home. Some historians, including Mr. Kraft, believe that the Native Americans were long gone from this area by that time.


STANV said:

ridski said:

Smedley said:

ridski said:

Keep the name but name it after Marshall Jefferson, one of the founding fathers of house music instead.

 Or Charles Jefferson from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. 

 That's not even a real person.

 Not sure this guy was real:

Chief Tuscan (or Tuskin), who is said to have lived in our valley, was reputedly born a Mohican. The late Maplewood historian Beatrice Herman wrote that according to James Ricalton, the village’s famous schoolmaster, Chief Tuscan had migrated from Upper New York State, and married an Indian maiden, joining the Lenni Lenape and setting up household with her in the ravine along what is now Tuscan Road.

By one account, when Chief Tuscan died in 1801, members of his tribe staged an elaborate funeral ritual, and he was buried in the vicinity of his home. Some historians, including Mr. Kraft, believe that the Native Americans were long gone from this area by that time.

 Tuscan Elementary was named after the milk company, everyone knows that.


ridski said:

 Tuscan Elementary was named after the milk company, everyone knows that.

 The milk company's prize cow was named Westo. She liked to wander along the ridges just west and north of Maplewood, hence that area is now called the Westo Range.


As someone mentioned before,perhaps schools should just have numbers,not names like some city schools. No one is perfect and finding a perfect replacement is impossible. I wonder how many of you in this conversation attended Jefferson School. Probably no one. For me it's also sentimental. I am a lover of history and a former teacher and drummerboy I am not a dude!


PVW said:

 The milk company's prize cow was named Westo. She liked to wander along the ridges just west and north of Maplewood, hence that area is now called the Westo Range.

 


Shouldn't be that hard to find someone who did good things and wasnt a rapist and/or human trafficker. I like the number idea tho as everyone's threshold for he wasnt perfect could be different. 


tjohn said:

 The same is not true of Washington or Jefferson or Lincoln (turns out he isn't perfect either).

We want our heroes to be perfect people when the more interesting discussions are about people who do great things but have offsetting misdeeds or unsavory aspects as well.

 Oh noooos. Not Lincoln, too?


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