School May Shed Association With A U.S. President (Berkeley)

The New York Sun ^ | June 22, 2005 | Daniel Hemel

[neverdem]

If the majority of parents, teachers, and students of Jefferson Elementary School in Berkeley, Calif., has its way, the school will soon shed its name and its association with the nation's third president, who they say is not worthy of being honored because of the hundreds of slaves he owned at his Monticello plantation.

The city's board of education is expected to vote today on a proposal to change the school's name to Sequoia Elementary.

But even with that name, the school district cannot quite dodge the slavery connotations. Some community members have pointed out that under Chief Sequoia's leadership in the early 19th century, the Cherokee nation owned more than 1,500 black slaves.

A spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District, Mark Coplan, acknowledged that Chief Sequoia "presumably owned slaves and was rather barbaric," but he emphasized that the proposed new name would honor the sequoia tree, not the Cherokee leader.

A petition to shed the name Jefferson from the school's title prompted an April vote in which parents, teachers, and students from kindergarten through fifth grade cast ballots to choose a new name. According to Mr. Coplan, Sequoia narrowly beat out the second-place candidate, Ohlone, which would have honored a California tribe. Other names rejected in the April vote would have paid tribute to the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, black diplomat Ralph Bunche, Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez, and Berkeley's late rent-board commissioner, Florence McDonald.

In a second vote last month, the school community voted 239-177 to change the school's name to Sequoia, with students overwhelmingly supporting the proposal, while parents' votes were almost evenly split.

The issue now goes to the Berkeley school board.

At a June 8 meeting, two of the board's five members said they are leaning in favor of the name change, while two members...

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

No there were no black people in Porky Pig cartoons.

But there is lots of pork!

Bacon, ribs,chops,roasts........yum.......time to light the barbeque pit.

[gate2wire]

Yes I believe it will be a barbeque kind of day.

[fatnotlazy]

...to match the students' overall attention span, intelligence and obesity?

***

Porky was probably smarter than some of the kids.

[doug from upland]

On another thread I gave an update. The Board said no to the change. I had called both the Board of Education and UC Berkeley to stick it to them by demanding that they change the name Berkeley because he was a slave owner.

[infidel dog]

Porky was probably more articulate as well.

[CROSSHIGHWAYMAN]

Porky was probably smarter than some of the kids.

Exactly!!

And enunciated better too........

[BlazingArizona]

Some community members have pointed out that under Chief Sequoia's leadership in the early 19th century, the Cherokee nation owned more than 1,500 black slaves.

So that leaves as a possibility...the Lenin School?

[em2vn]

I read your post of the article. Too bad that people don't check before they post something that has been hashed over FR days before.

[fortunecookie]

Yes, name the school after a tree, that will help encourage the 'goddess' and earth worship. When I first read this story, I heard it was a school dropping a 'confederate' era name. I never imagined it was Jefferson. What must the Jefferson Dems be thinking?

[Smartaleck]

These people are completely ignorant and have no sense of this great man.

David G. Post
Temple University Law School1
http://www.temple.edu/lawschool/dpost/slavery.PDF

"Jefferson did more to end slavery in the United States than anyone else in in the United States than anyone else in American history with the single exception of Abraham Lincoln (who, not coincidentally, took Jefferson as his guiding light)

“I am sustained by Mr. Jefferson.”
Abraham Lincoln
Springfield, Illinois, July 17, 1858

"He loathed slavery – this “great political and
moral evil,” he called it in the only book he published in his lifetime, Notes on Virginia."

“What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible, machine is man,” he wrote for the entry for “The United States” to be included in Diderot’s great Encycolpedie in the mid 1780s,
“who can endure toil, famine, stripes, imprisonment and death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him through his trial, and inflict on his fellow-men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose.”

"...in 1769, while a member of the Virginia House of Burgesses, Jefferson helped to draft a bill to allow for “manumission by deed” – a procedure whereby slave-owners could transfer, by deed, their “property interest” in slaves back to the slaves themselves, setting them free. The bill eventually passed in 1782, and Jefferson – by then the Governor of the new state – signed it into law that year;

· as a fledgling practicing lawyer, in 1770, in his argument in the obscure case of Howell v. Netherland, which involved the freedom or enslavement of a third-generation mulatto, Jefferson had pled that “we are all born free” and that slavery was contrary to natural law – an argument the court dismissed out of hand.

· Jefferson prepared not one but two drafts of a Constitution for the State of Virginia, one in 1776, one in 1783. The earlier draft would have prohibited the importation of slaves into the State: “No person hereafter
coming into this county shall be held within the same in slavery under any pretext whatever.” The 1783 draft went further: “The General assembly shall not have to power to ... permit the introduction of any more slaves to
reside in this state, or the continuance of slavery beyond the generation which shall be living on the 31st day of December 1800; all persons born after that day being hereby declared free.”

· As a member of the federal Congress in 1783-84, Jefferson drafted and submitted to that body a Report on the Government of the Western Territories, which Congress enacted into law as the Ordinance of 1784. It provided that “after the year 1800 of the Christian era, there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude . . . otherwise than in punishment of crimes, whereof the party shall have been duly convicted to have been personally guilty” in any part of the United States outside of the original 13 colonies.

The slavery prohibition was deleted by Congress from the
final bill – by a single vote. (Under the Articles of Confederation, which were then in effect, laws could be enacted only if supported by the delegations of seven States. Six States (Penn., NY, Conn., R.I., Mass.,
Maine) supported Jefferson’s slavery prohibition; three (Virginia [Jefferson himself dissenting], MD, and SC) opposed it; NC was divided.

New Jersey would have supported the prohibition but its delegate, James Beatty, was ill and did not attend the session. Jefferson wrote later in his Autobiography:

“Seven votes being requisite to decide the proposition
affirmatively, it was lost. The voice of a single individual of the State which was divided [New Jersey] . . . would have prevented this abominable crime from spreading itself over the new country.

Thus we see the fate of millions unborn hanging on the tongue of one man, and Heaven was silent in that awful moment! But it is to be hoped it will not always be silent, and that the friends to the rights of human nature will in the end prevail.”

Jefferson introduced, Congress passed, and Jefferson signed, a bill prohibiting any further importation of slaves as of the earliest date the Constitution permitted: January 1, 1808.

Were the rights of all included in the Declaration of Independence?

Jefferson makes it clear by including the following paragraph later in the document, on the list of King George III’s“abuses and usurpations” “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying
them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither.

This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his negative
[i.e., his veto powers over Colonial legislation], suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce. And that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he
is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on whom he also obtruded them: thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges
them to commit against the lives of another.”2

This passage, like the anti-slavery provisions in Jefferson’s draft of the Ordinance of 1784, was deleted by Congress before final approval of the Declaration.

---

Some call him a hypocrite. What is missing from this charge -
Here's a man born to the upper class of VA, a gentry-man raised with slavery as a part of the culture, the inherent right to inherit, own them and "the way things are."
Yet, he had the moral fiber and innate sense of "justice" to write the words above to change this culture he was raised to believe he was entitled to.
Alas Jefferson eventually recognized the futility of trying in his time to end slavery but knew some future leader would arrive and seize the opportunity to eliminate that which he obviously loathed.

[fatnotlazy]

At least, Porky didn't speak in Ebonics. :)

[Smartaleck]

"Too bad that people don't check before they post something that has been hashed over FR days before."

Too bad people finding such previous "hashing" don't provide a link to that which they are referring. ;-)

[neverdem]

Thanks for the update.

[Carry_Okie]

“God, who gave us life gave us liberty. Can the liberties of a nation be secure when we have removed a conviction that these liberties are the gift of God? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. That his justice cannot sleep for-ever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free.” -- Thomas Jefferson

[jmaroneps37]

WOW!!!! THAT WILL CERTAINLY BE A BIG BLOW FOR CIVIL RIGHTS IN THIS COUNTRY!!!!!! WHY IT MIGHT EVEN MEAN THE NAALCP CAN CLOSE DOWN BECAUSE ITS WORK IS DONE!!!!!

[bill1952]

They don't care one whit for blacks or the slavery of 200 years ago.

They want to change America into another country entirely, and that's it.

They aren't worthy to shine President Jefferson's shoes.

[tertiary01]

The man that Berkeley was named for has a similiar problem.


http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1428681/posts

[tertiary01]

OOPs wrong thread, I tried to post this to another thread.

[tertiary01]

I 'm just confused, ignore my last post

[neverdem]

Thank you for the link and quotes. BTW, is there a way to convert that pdf file to HTML so you can print it on the screen?