Having it named for Jefferson Davis harmed precisely nobody. This kinda reeks of Don Quixote going after windmills.
I think otherwise. There are black students studying there, and having their school named after a person who thought of them as subhumans that could to be enslaved is seriously offending. I know I'd feel offended if my school was named after Hermann Göring or something.
It's ridiculous equating the naming of a school after a terrible person with an endorsement of everything they did.
It's not an endorsement, but names are an important means of identification. I was proud to study in a school named after Anne Frank, and it's part of the school's identity. So why not change Davis' name to that of someone who isn't a terrible person?
And of course it varies. Jefferson Davis was a US Senator from Mississippi. If this school were named for Adolf Hitler instead, it would be indefensable. Nazis were via pretty much most or all metrics worse than the Confederacy, and were more nefarious.
The Confederacy isn't as abnormal in its day as the Nazis were either. It was the end result of a region tied to a peculiar institution being unable to bring itself to accept neither it being removed or moderated in any way nor the real possibility a Republican President would avoid destroying their subhuman way of life overnight. Fears similar to this in structure shaded the actions followed by European slavemasters in the Caribbean, Russian serf owners, as well as many colonial European administrators elsewhere. The entrenched fearing the downtrodden, et cetera.
The Confederacy was a distinctly American version of this international story. It is part of our national history and part of the American story regardless of what we think. In this context it's quite defensible for there to be a Jefferson Davis name somewhere. He is part of the American tapestry, even though he cannot be called a good person by any measure. But the students in this school don't have to keep his name, because Obama without a doubt has his claim to fame too. These black students have every right to pursue the renaming of this school in overwhelmingly black Jackson County in honor of America's first black president.
That doesn't mean everyone can remove everything Confederate related for any reason. This can become iconoclastic cultural cleansing when done in the extreme, which helps no one. It does nothing for the descendants of those enslaved in the South - it just is a blood sacrifice of some of our culture on the altar of satisfying the too easily offended. There are better ways to help downtrodden minorities in this country from the effects of institutional racism and other things holding them back. This, in comparative terms, is a silly side issue.
Well, the issue here was not bridges and statues. It was this particular school, and I believe we're in agreement that black students have a right to study in a school named after someone who saw them as subhumans.
As for the rest, while I agree that the Confederacy is an important part of American history and should be forgotten, I don't see how naming public places after traitors to the U.S. is beneficial to that. Museums, documentary movies, teaching it in school etc do it well enough.
