Some in Marin take stand against Dixie
“My association with (the word) Dixie is fairly strong and entirely negative.” Alex Stadtner, supports changing name of Dixie School District
“I think in the 155 years, times have changed.” Mercy Chu, opposes changing school district’s name
Marin County is about as far from the Confederate South as you can get.
Yet in the middle of the liberal enclave is Dixie, a small school district with a name that’s dividing the community, pitting parent against parent, neighbor against neighbor.
Some of the residents in the northern corner of San Rafael want to change the name, saying the word Dixie harks back to the Confederacy and is both a symbol of the pro-slavery South and an affront to African Americans.
Others want to keep it, saying any association to the South has long been erased by liberal-leaning Marin County residents who say the name Dixie represents a school system with an excellent reputation.
The dispute echoes a national debate over the fate of Confederate monuments and other public institutions honoring historical figures associated with slavery.
In San Rafael, the battle has been ugly, with residents resorting in recent days to legal warnings, pilfered lawn signs, character assassination and charges of racism.
For nearly 155 years, it’s been called the Dixie School District. It’s located in the northern part of the Marin County city, with four schools enrolling about
2,000 students, most white, who post some of the best test scores in the state.
The debate over the Dixie name has popped up several times over the past few decades, first in 1997, then in 2003, 2015 and again this year. So far the name — which goes back to 1864 — has stuck.
It’s time to change it, said parent Alex Stadtner, who moved to San Rafael from Texas about four years ago and was stunned that a school district here would be called Dixie.
“I come from the South,” he said. “My association with (the word) Dixie is fairly strong and entirely negative.”
It does not reflect well on what is a predominantly white community, he added.
“We have less than 3 percent African American in the district, and it’s called Dixie,” said Stadtner, the father of a kindergartner at Dixie Elementary School. “It’s forcing a very contentious but important conversation about race and about disparity and about institutional racism that this community apparently needs to have.”
Yet fellow parent Mercy Chu said that when many people think of the Dixie School District, they think of “excellence in education.”
“I think in the 155 years, times have changed,” said Chu, who has two children at Dixie Elementary and spoke on behalf of the We Are Dixie group opposed to a name change.
Renaming the district would cost a lot, Chu said, money that could and should be spent on children. While there is no official estimate, changing everything that says “Dixie” on it could cost upward of $100,000, opponents said.
Each side has created a website promoting its arguments for keeping or changing the name, with links to sign up supporters.
The Change the Name site includes hundreds of backers, including former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and Marin County resident Melba Beals, one of the Little Rock Nine, who integrated an Arkansas school in 1957.
The We Are Dixie site doesn’t list the group’s supporters, but an online petition indicates that 297 people out of a goal of 1,000 have signed it.
Some of those associated with the effort to keep the name declined to comment, saying they have been attacked and labeled as racists for wanting to preserve Dixie. Signs calling for the community to “Keep Dixie Dixie” were reportedly pilfered by opponents, they said.
On their website, they argue that “keeping the name Dixie School District maintains the history of our small neighborhood and does not allow it to be hijacked by political agenda.”
The name has come to symbolize “generosity, pride, tolerance, inclusion and an independent, progressive spirit,” Dixie supporters say on the site.
So far, Dixie’s five-member school board is moving slowly in response to the outcry, mulling whether to put an advisory referendum on a future ballot to take the pulse of the voters, possibly in 2020.
Those who want to change the name say that’s not good enough and plan to submit petitions with specific name options, a move that — per state law — would require the school board to vote on each suggested name within 40 days, said Dixie School Board member Marnie Glickman, who is helping spearhead the effort.
“There’s a lot of sadness and I would say these discussions are difficult, but we need to have them to address what the word Dixie means,” Glickman said. “Some people are really hurt by this name and they have shared their stories with us, their tears and their anger.”
Glickman escalated the fight last week, with her lawyer sending a letter to district officials accusing the school board of violating state Brown Act laws. Board members discussed the name change in closed session without properly notifying the public, Glickman said.
On the other side, Dixie supporters attacked Glickman’s husband, David Curtis, for publishing online tweets he made in 2017, which contain profanity and rants about his neighbors.
In the middle of the ugly battle are dramatically different accounts of where the name Dixie came from.
Name changers believe pioneer and public school supporter John Miller named the district after the Confederacy on a bet with Southern sympathizers during the Civil War.
Those opposed to the change say Miller named the district after a Miwok Indian named Mary Dixie who lived in Vallecito, near the town of Murphy, where Miller had spent time after arriving in California.
There’s no direct connection or explanation why he would name a school district after an Indian girl.
Regardless of where Dixie came from, San Rafael Mayor Gary Phillips said he supports the name change and has suggested naming it the Miller School District, after the founder.
“It’s always seemed a little odd to have a school district in this area called Dixie,” he said. “It seemed out of character.”
Mill Valley resident Kerry Peirson has been fighting to change the name since 1997 after watching the documentary series “Eyes on the Prize,” a movie that includes a scene of a sheriff kicking a young black man. The images enraged him.
Shortly after, he said, he was reading the newspaper and saw a story about a local soccer team called the Dixie Stompers, he said.
He took the idea of changing the name to the Dixie School Board, where he said he was “the only black face in the room.” Those in attendance called him a “gorilla,” and he later received death threats, he added. The name remained.
He tried again in 2003, with more support and still no success. There was another failed effort in 2015.
Peirson said he’s hopeful that this time the community will see that Dixie is a name that brings pain to many people.
History shows that San Rafael largely sided with the Democrats during the Civil War, which was the side supporting the South and slavery.
And across the Bay Area, there were pockets of the Confederacy, with about 20 percent of the state supporting the South during the Civil War, according to the National Park Service.
So many decades later, the name Dixie, Peirson said, is a metaphor for the ongoing inequity in Marin County, where the average home costs $1.3 million and African Americans make up less than 3 percent of residents.
“I think there’s an element of hypocrisy to Marin — a pretense of a bastion of democracy and tolerance on the surface,” he said. “All of the indicators say we’re a lot more like Dixie than (the birthplace of democracy in) Athens.”
Jill Tucker is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: jtucker@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @jilltucker