Holly MatkinSan Francisco, CA – Former President Abraham Lincoln’s name will likely be removed from a San Francisco high school because he never demonstrated “that black lives ever mattered” to him, and because he implemented policies that were “detrimental” to Native Americans, according to a school committee report.
Lincoln has long been heralded for abolishing slavery in the U.S. by leading the Union in its defeat of the Confederacy during the Civil War.
He subsequently issued the Emancipation Proclamation, declaring “that all persons held as slaves” within the rebellious states “are, and henceforward shall be free,” the Daily Mail reported.
“He saved the country from dividing and ruin,” Hunter College’s Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute scholar Harold Holzer said, according to the Daily Mail. “He should be honored for it.”
But the San Francisco School Names Advisory Committee disagreed, and has declared that Lincoln High School and multiple other locations bearing the names of as many as 44 historical figures should be renamed.
“Lincoln, like the presidents before him and most after, did not show through policy or rhetoric that Black lives ever mattered to them outside of human capital and as casualties of wealth building,” committee chairman Jeremiah Jeffries said, according to FOX News.
Jeffries said the positive actions Lincoln took during his presidency are overshadowed by the negative aspects of his time in office, the Daily Mail reported.
“Abraham Lincoln is not seen as much of a hero at all among many American Indian Nations and Native peoples of the United States, as the majority of his policies proved to be detrimental to them,” the committee’s report determined, according to the Daily Mail.
The Homestead Act of 1862 was enacted while Lincoln was in office, allowing citizens to claim 160 acres of land, much of which were already being utilized by Native American tribes.
The committee also faulted Lincoln for ushering in the Pacific Railway Act, which resulted in a transcontinental railroad that “led to the significant loss of land and natural resources, as well as the loss of lifestyle and culture, for many Indigenous peoples,” the Daily Mail reported.
It also resulted in the settlement of the West, to include present-day San Francisco.
A Navajo tribe was forced to travel 450 miles from present-day Arizona to present-day New Mexico under Lincoln’s administration, a grueling march that resulted in hundreds of deaths.
The renaming committee used a variety of criteria to determine which historical figures should be removed from public buildings, to include anyone who was a slave owner, a known racist or white supremacist, those connected with environmental or human rights abuses, and anyone directly involved in colonization, FOX News reported.
They ended up generating a list of 44 historical figures – including Lincoln, former Presidents George Washington and Herbert Hoover, and U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D – California) – who they deem unworthy of having their names associated with the San Francisco Unified School District, according to the Daily Mail.
The committee is pushing to strip Feinstein’s name from a local elementary school, since she allowed a Confederate flag to be flown outside City Hall when she was mayor of San Francisco back in 1984.
“Dianne Feinstein chose to fly a flag that is the iconography of domestic terrorism, racism, white avarice and inhumanity towards Black and Indigenous people at the City Hall,” Jeffries said, according to FOX News. “She is one of the few living examples on our list, so she still has time to dedicate the rest of her life to the upliftment of Black, First Nations and other people of color.”
“She hasn’t thus far,” he added.
Jeffries, a first-grade teacher, said it is important for the community to withdraw these figures’ names from positions of honor.
“Uprooting the problematic names and symbols that currently clutter buildings, streets, throughout the city is a worthy endeavor,” Jeffries declared, according to The Blaze. “Only good can come from the public being reflective and intentional about the power of our words, names, and rhetoric within our public institutions.”
Holzer argued that the committee’s attempt to measure the worth of historical figures using today’s standards skews the context, the Daily Mail reported.
“Nobody is going to pass 21st century mores if you’re looking at the 18th and 19th centuries,” the scholar pointed out.
The school board is slated to vote on the committee’s name-changing recommendations early next year, according to The Blaze.
