Last Two Schools in CA Named for a Confederate.. FB High & Middle Schools

Data from the Southern Poverty Law Center has noted that there are only two schools named after Confederates in the entire state of California: Fort Bragg High School and Fort Bragg Middle School, named after Braxton Bragg. But there used to be more. Quite close to us is the former Dixie Elementary School in San Rafael, CA.

As reported in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat (Associated Press, July 9, 2019):

Trustees of Marin County’s Dixie School District voted Tuesday to change the name of the 150-year-old district, which critics linked to the Confederacy and slavery.

Dixie will be renamed the Miller Creek Elementary School District, with the district’s only elementary school, changed from Dixie to Lucas Valley Elementary.

The name-change issue pitted parents against each other and generated heated debate in San Rafael, an overwhelmingly white city of 59,000 people. Some insisted the Dixie name was racially insensitive, while others complained the proposed change was political correctness run amok.

Dixie is a nickname for the pro-slavery Confederacy, whose legacy prompts political, legal and cultural conflicts to this day.

Though San Rafael is much larger than Fort Bragg, there are parallels. It was a controversial decision, and there was plenty of pushback.

More interesting on this name change comes from The Guardian: (Vivian Ho, April 21, 2019)

“People wanted a nice story,” said Marnie Glickman, a Dixie School Board trustee who was a driving force behind the latest effort to change the name. “They wanted to believe that racism and the Confederacy couldn’t exist in Marin.”

We Are Dixie, the group that formed to oppose the name change and put up lawn signs calling to “Keep Dixie Dixie”, felt that changing the name besmirched the legacy of James Miller, the man who founded the school district.

In a 1972 application to the National Park Service, the Dixie Schoolhouse Foundation cited Frances Miller Leitz, the granddaughter of James Miller, as saying that her grandfather had named the school itself on a dare. James Miller’s great-great grandson, Lucien Miller, said James Miller was a Democrat. During the civil war era, southern Democrats favored slavery while the Republican party was the party of Abraham Lincoln.

But opponents of the name change were doing research as well. They found a Miwok Native American woman named Mary Dixie, who lived 140 miles away in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Though James Miller sold cattle in the area where Mary Dixie lived in 1849, there is no record of the man ever meeting the woman they believe to be the school district’s namesake.

For Glickman, nothing better captured the crux of the whole fight than the fact that the opponents to the name change named their group We Are Dixie. She felt that they saw themselves as this name, as this place, as the founder, and that to call out the word’s Confederate and racist roots was akin to calling them racist.

At the very least, the fight unearthed something ugly in Marin county, and not just from the civil war era.

“I was the target of serious of antisemitism,” Glickman said. “I received death threats. All for saying that Dixie is a synonym for the Confederacy.”

To Kerry Peirson, a black man living in a county that is not even 3% black, this was nothing new. When he first brought the issue to the board in 1997, he was the only black person in the room.

“They were saying, ‘Go back to where you come from, you gorilla,’” he said. “That room turned into the Antebellum south. No one corrected the man who called me a gorilla. That atmosphere, I don’t know if I ever felt so scared in an institutional setting.”

And whether they choose to believe it or not, this mindset continues in Marin county to this day, Peirson said.

“Marin had one of the highest percentages of Obama voters in the state,” he said. “There are contradictions. It’s a different kind of bigotry. They like to project themselves as progressive and liberal, but they are blind to blatant racism.”

Does any of this story resonate for those of us who live in Fort Bragg?