It’s not cancel culture

A recent editorial lamented the fact that the Little Rock School Board is considering changing the name of Fulbright Elementary School. In typical right-wing fashion, the editorial described this as another example of “cancel culture.”

I would suggest the writer consider this: 60 percent of the students in the Little Rock School District are Black. Why should the parents of these students send them to a school named after a U.S. senator notorious for signing the Southern Manifesto in 1956, as well as voting against the Civil Rights Acts of 1957, 1960, and 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965? Because of his other accomplishments, William Fulbright is rarely described as a segregationist, certainly not by this newspaper, but one could certainly make the case for that description based on his civil rights record while he was a senator.

Perhaps the school should be renamed for the man who defeated Fulbright in 1974, Dale Bumpers. Twenty years prior to that election, Bumpers, a young attorney in Charleston, advised that town’s school board to integrate its schools in 1954 in response to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. By doing so, Charleston became the first town in the South to integrate all 12 grades in its public schools, thereby ending the ridiculous practice of busing its Black high school students to Fort Smith, 24 miles away.

So go ahead and call this another example of “cancel culture.” I prefer to think of it as another example of fixing something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. One man’s “cancel culture” is another man’s “damage repair.”

THOMAS G. MAY

North Little Rock