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Via Workers World News Service
Reprinted from the Dec. 11, 1997
issue of Workers World newspaper
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Editorial: A good history lesson

The African American community in New Orleans is teaching a valuable lesson. Think of it as Anti-Racist History 101. Schools are being stripped of the names of slave owners and confederate generals. Such a progressive action makes anti-racist fighters everywhere feel proud and emboldened.

The capitalist ruling class, however, is enraged, because on Oct. 27, the Orleans Parish School Board voted unanimously to change the name of George Washington Elementary to Dr. Charles Richard Drew Elementary.

Until now, schoolchildren of all nationalities have been taught that George Washington was the benevolent "father of our country" whose character was marked by fessing up to chopping down a cherry tree. And in response to the school board’s action, the big-business media dragged out a bevy of elite academicians to argue that Washington was a "moderate" on slavery. As utterly insulting as that argument is, there’s one fact ivy-tower historians can’t argue with: Washington was a slave owner.

The school board in New Orleans has brought that information to the fore. Washington "inherited" 10 slaves when he was 11. At the time of his death, 316 African people were forced to labor as slaves on his Virginia plantation. One fifth-grade teacher at Drew Elementary said, "And now we’re teaching kids who are descendants of the people who would have been his property."

Today, 98 percent of the students at Charles Richard Drew Elementary are African American. The new school name honors a Black surgeon who developed techniques to preserve blood plasma and who protested the U.S. Army’s racist segregation of blood supplies.

Who on earth would oppose the Orleans Parish School Board’s commendable action? Only those who feel a class affinity with the slave-owning, landed aristocracy’s claim to private ownership of the earth and those who toiled on it.

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