Symbols of pain

Renaming HISD schools that were founded in the name of Confederate leaders is long overdue, and I support HISD’s decision to change the names of Johnston Middle, Lanier Middle and Davis High. The cost of funding these changes in the midst of financial challenges is unfortunate but worthwhile. Those in our community who oppose the changes are right to question budgetary concerns but not moral ones. It’s too bad HISD trustees failed to act on proposals made in 2009.

Let’s look at Davis High as an example. Today, 100 percent of its approximate 1,700 students are Title I, of which 87 percent are Hispanic and 12 percent African American. Built in 1926, Jefferson Davis High School was founded at the height of the Jim Crow era in the early days of HISD’s existence. In naming the school, Superintendent Edison Oberholtzer and the all-white HISD Board of Education deliberately honored the greatest icon for the protection of slavery, President of the Confederate States Jefferson Davis. This name legally yet immorally acknowledged past supremacy and promised future vigilance of the socio-economic score card. In short, the community got a poke in the eye but gained a school.

It’s easy to describe minority concerns as “hypersensitivity” when in the majority. Aname can seem trivial when it symbolizes nothing negative to one and of absolute consequence to another when associated with a legacy of pain.

Beverly Jurenko, Houston