Take Stonewall Jackson out, put Roberto Clemente in
Before he was a respected humanitarian, before he was one of the greatest baseball players of all time, before he was an American civil rights icon,
Puerto Rican outfielder Roberto
Clemente would sometimes be unceremoniously introduced at ballparks as “Bobby” Clemente. The decision to Anglicize his name, as if to hide from baseball fans in Eisenhower-era America that the figure stretching in left field was indeed a Black Latino man, was never lost on Clemente.
Years later, Clemente would comment on his status in a largely white professional field that “to the people here, we are outsiders. Foreigners.”
Clemente was known to have a generous disposition. So perhaps he would laugh at the dogpile that’s occurring today over a push to rename a middle school in Orange County after him — now deep into extra innings due to the intransigence of the local School Advisory Council (SAC). Perhaps he’d find it funny that nearly three-quarters of a century after baseball executives first mangled his name in 1955, some people are still doing everything they can to avoid seeing “Roberto Clemente” up on a big wall.
But I’m not laughing. For more than a year now, I’ve joined many civically engaged Puerto Ricans in pressing both the Orange County School Board and the school’s SAC to rename Stonewall Jackson Middle School after Clemente. At every turn, what we thought would be a home run, a spiritually uplifting and community-unifying gesture to baptize the school after an American hero, has been met with bad calls by the local school advisory council. The council’s inexplicable and frustrating paper-shuffling in making the decision has been divisive and inexcusable.
Let’s not forget where we started, more
than two years ago, with community concerns that perhaps a middle school where over 75% of children are Black and Latino should not be named after an avowed and violent racist like Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson.
At the time, the school’s advisory council was given the task of finding a new name. And after six months of studying the issue their recommendation was to... keep the same name, but shorter. That unforced error should have ended the advisory council’s moral authority on this matter. But the school board, while immediately sending Jackson’s name to the rubbish heap of history, gave the council one more at-bat.
Staff in the middle-school-tobe-named-later then proceeded to query the students as to their preference, with Clemente’s name a top vote-getter. Yet when they presented five options to the community, the Puerto Rican hero’s name was not even included. Now, having seen just how much of an uproar that omission has caused in the community, the school’s SAC is changing the rules as it goes.
Having exhausted the community’s patience, the school advisory council needs to sit the rest of this one out, letting the School Board take over and change the school’s name.
As towns, cities, counties, and states around America are swiftly striking Confederate generals’ names from public facilities and renaming them after local community icons, the advisory council’s total willingness to slow-walk the issue of the nameless school is downright embarrassing and enraging.
You don’t need a windsock in the outfield to know which way the wind is blowing.
The School Board should take the responsibility for renaming the middle school away from the advisory council, and rename the middle school in a way that delivers a message of pride to our community: Roberto Clemente Middle School.
And the advisory council needs to sit quietly in the dugout of their own conscience and think about what they’ve done. By so blatantly opposing the overwhelmingly popular choice of the community, students and parents who they are supposed to serve, they are making many of us feel, in Clemente’s own words that “to the people here, we are outsiders. Foreigners.”