Fort Bragg renaming may go to voters
The nationwide protests over police racism and brutality have forced city officials in the historic city of Fort Bragg to face up to the ugly history of its namesake, Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, who enslaved more than 100 people.
The City Council in the rugged coastal hamlet agreed to consider scheduling a vote next week on a name change after 50 to 60 requests came in over the past two weeks accusing the Mendocino County enclave of glorifying a racist traitor by using his last name.
The idea is likely to cause a ruckus at the city’s first live public meeting since the COVID19 shelterathome order was lifted.
Tabatha Miller, the Fort Bragg city manager, said an item will be placed on the June 22 agenda in the next couple of days asking council mem
bers whether they want to place the issue on the November ballot. If the council agrees, they will be asked to come up with a list of three alternative names, she said.
“Certainly, if you are going to consider changing the name of a city that has existed for 135 years, you want to involve the public in what a new name should be,” said Miller, noting that city action was necessary because the deadline for a citizens’ initiative has passed.
Alternate names, like Glass Beach and Pomo Bluffs, have been brought up. River City and Noyo, which is what American Indians called the area, have also been suggested as more appropriate monikers.
The idea was last brought up five years ago by the California Legislative Black Caucus and state Sen. Steve Glazer, DOrinda, who called the name “Bragg” an insult to African Americans. The demands came that time during a backlash against symbols of the rebel South caused by the massacre in June 2015 of nine worshipers inside a black church in Charleston, S.C. The white man who committed the crime, Dylann Roof, was photographed holding the Confederate battle flag. Roof was sentenced to death by a federal jury in January 2017.
But Fort Bragg locals didn’t embrace the notion of changing the city’s name and the City Council quickly tabled it.
The latest calls were sparked by the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd, the African American man who died in Minneapolis after a police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes. In recent days, statues of Confederate generals have been torn down amid nationwide demonstrations against police brutality and against systematic racism. Similarly, a statue of colonizer Christopher Columbus was torn down, set ablaze and thrown into a lake in Richmond, Va.
NASCAR recently announced it would ban the Confederate flag from all of its events and properties.
California banned public display by the government of the Confederate flag six years ago. South Carolina and Alabama also removed the flag from their capital buildings.
Other symbols of racism have recently been removed in the Bay Area. The UC Berkeley School of Law agreed to stop using the name “Boalt” in 2018 because lawyer John Boalt inspired the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and spoke derisively about Native Americans and people of African descent. The same year, Stanford University decided to erase the name of “Serra” from two dormitories because Father Junipero Serra, the 18th century leader of the California missions, helped destroy native culture in the state.
Fort Bragg was established in 1857 when Horatio Gates Gibson, a lieutenant serving at the Presidio of San Francisco, set up a military post to keep control of the natives confined to the newly established Mendocino Indian Reservation. He named the camp after Braxton Bragg, his former commanding officer.
The town was incorporated in 1889. The remainder of the old fort, a small building painted white, stands next to city hall.
Bragg looked a lot like Abraham Lincoln, judging by a portrait of the old general kept in a dusty room at the Guest House Museum. But the resemblance was only skin deep. He was indisputably a turncoat, serving as a general in the Confederate army during the Civil War. To make matters worse, he enslaved 105 African Americans.
Bragg, who never visited the town that bears his name, “led many bloody battles” against the Union army, the black caucus said in its letter, which urged the community to end its association with “such a disgraced and treasonous figure in our nation’s history.”
Fort Bragg was a lumber town until the Georgia Pacific mill closed in 2002. It is now a mostly bluecollar salmon port, tourist destination, and gateway to redwood forests and the Lost Coast.
A historical marker on Main Street mentions Bragg, but there is very little about him in the museum nearby. Miller said the Civil War had not occurred when Bragg’s name was attached to the town, and few of the 7,200 residents identify the name with the confederacy or the general. She said the vast majority of the requests for a name change have been lodged by people from out of town.
A name change, she said, would affect some 30 local businesses that use the name of the town, including Fort Bragg Electric and Fort Bragg Plumbing.
“So it does get a little bit tricky for folks (and) I am certain that this would be a very emotional issue for people,” she said. “I don’t think anybody dismisses the current climate and most people recognize that reform is probably necessary, but folks have lived in Fort Bragg for many, many generations, so the idea of changing the name of a town they have lived in for so long is difficult to grasp.”