A Virginia school board voted this week to change the names of two schools because their namesakes were slave owners — even though one of them was America’s third president and the other was another Founding Father.
Falls Church City Public Schools will rename Thomas Jefferson Elementary School and George Mason High School following a unanimous vote to approve the measure Wednesday.
“The Board took seriously the viewpoints and concerns raised by many students, parents, staff, and community members,” said School Board Chair Greg Anderson.
Prior to the vote, the school board conducted a survey to gauge the public’s interest in changing the names of the schools. Only 26 percent of the nearly 3,500 parents, students, and staff members surveyed supported renaming the George Mason school, and only 23 percent supported renaming the Thomas Jefferson Elementary. By contrast, 56 percent opposed renaming both of them.
Despite this fact, Anderson said the change was “in the best interest” of students and “a necessary part of our equity work.”
“Our schools must be places where all students, staff, and community members feel safe, supported, and inspired,” the board chairman said.
Jefferson has been a constant target of the historical revisionists, especially over the last year as vandals associated with the Black Lives Matter movement have toppled monuments and statues dedicated to historical figures they deem “racist.”
For leftists, Jefferson is problematic because he owned slaves. Added to that is the charge that he carried on an affair with 16-year-old slave Sally Hemings, and went on to father six of her children.
But as TNA writer R. Cort Kirkwood notes, the Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society published The Jefferson-Hemings Controversy: Report of the Scholars Commission, which showed the Jefferson-Hemings tale to be false. DNA tests did not, as widely believed, connect Jefferson to Hemings, and other historical research showed the claims of so-called offspring and descendants of the two were also untrue.
What Jefferson did do was author the Declaration of Independence, which justified secession from Great Britain and explicitly stated that God, not the state, gives us inalienable rights that can’t be taken away by the government.
Kirkwood explains about other aspects of Jefferson’s legacy:
He also wrote the Virginia Statute on Religious Freedom, which Virginia’s General Assembly adopted in 1786 and which anticipated the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. “No man shall be compelled to frequent or support any religious worship, place, or ministry whatsoever,” it says, “nor shall be enforced, restrained, molested, or burdened in his body or goods, nor shall otherwise suffer, on account of his religious opinions or belief.”
… With the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, he doubled the size of the United States by acquiring 827,000 square miles of territory from Napoleon for the meager sum of $15 million. The transaction included all of Iowa, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma, almost all of the Dakotas, Minnesota west of the Mississippi River, parts of Texas and New Mexico, and Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Rocky Mountains.… Yet because he was a man of his time and one aspect of his life does not meet 21st-century sensibilities, the stunning memorial on the Tidal Basin must be demolished.
George Mason, meanwhile, is famous for refusing to sign the Constitution at the Constitutional Convention. One of his reasons? Because he wanted an immediate end to the slave trade.
Mason also led the fight for a bill of rights in the Constitution, and it’s heavily thanks to him that James Madison introduced, in the First Congress, the first 10 Amendments that constitute the Bill of Rights.
But again, none if means much to the Left, who ignore history and see nothing more than “racist old white men” upon looking at any historical statue. Unfamiliarity with history is why even statues of Abraham Lincoln and black abolitionist Frederick Douglass have been targeted by the “woke mob.”
Such ridiculous acts are not only a sign of ignorance on the part of the vandals, but show that the overarching agenda of the current “social justice” movement is to make war on all of Western history in order to replace it with an alternative Marxist history. It’s the same agenda that fueled the toppling of statues in the Soviet Union and during Communist China’s Cultural Revolution.
If the cultural pillagers aren’t stopped in their tracks, they’ll keep going until they’ve burned all America’s heritage to the ground.
