School board to take LeConte name off school in Berkeley
For decades, a Berkeley elementary school has carried the name of a prominent conservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. But the 19th century geologist, Joseph LeConte, also was a slave owner and munitions supplier to the Confederacy during the Civil War, and parents wanted his name off their children’s school.
The Berkeley school board honored that request Wednesday night, voting to strip the LeConte name off the school and begin a process to select a new moniker.
The decision follows similar ones by elected leaders across the state to remove the names of those with pasts stained by racism. Palo Alto last year rebranded two schools that were named after men who supported eugenics, the
belief that selective breeding and sterilization can improve the human race.
The vote in Berkeley follows a months-long process initiated by community members to rename the south Berkeley school that included meetings, straw polls and conversations about LeConte’s record.
District policy requires that a school named after an individual “shall examine whether the individual, on the whole, has made outstanding contributions to the community or made contributions of state, national or worldwide significance in light of the Berkeley community’s values and contemporary view on history.”
In 1892, when the school was named, LeConte was a renowned professor at UC Berkeley, joining the faculty after the Civil War.
But the board accepted schools Superintendent Donald Evans’ recommendation to remove the LeConte name after 125 years.
“I am a proud graduate of Columbus Elementary School, but I am even prouder of the fact that the school is now named after Rosa Parks. That is not erasing history, it is not whitewashing the past, it is progress towards a more inclusive, welcoming, and just public education system.
“He believed that it would take centuries of evolution to put races on an equal footing,” Evans said in a statement attached to the resolution.
Before the war, LeConte and his brother, John, were the owners of a 3,356-acre plantation with 200 slaves, district officials said.
“In the Berkeley Unified School District, we take pride in our diversity, we hold high expectations for ourselves and our students, and we treat each other with respect and act with integrity,” Evans said. “Joseph LeConte’s racist, sexist beliefs are antithetical to these values.” In San Francisco before the 1895 Women’s Congress, LeConte gave a lecture on his theory that evolution in the “higher races” meant greater sex role differentiation, and his implication that women’s role should be limited and not include voting.
He still has a waterfall, canyon, glacier and mountain named after him in addition to schools and university buildings, including one at UC Berkeley.
“LeConte’s views, one hopes, would be repudiated by most people today,” Evans said. “Some might excuse his supremacist views and call him ‘a man of his time,’ but we should also point out a Civil War was fought over the question of racial equality, and he took the side that believed that our Union should be torn asunder in order that human beings could continue to be treated as property.”