The Battle for Renaming Fanning Continues
January 28, 2019
On, Monday, January 14, the city of Brea-Olinda held a City Hall Meeting to discuss the ongoing argument of renaming William E. Fanning Elementary School.
The battle fought by those involved in this process has been a long and a strenuous one. The group Ban the KKK has repeatedly shown evidence of William Fanning’s involvement with the KKK during the 1920s. During this period, Brea-Olinda was known as a “sunset town. Black citizens were not allowed to live in the city and were expected to leave by 6 pm if they entered.
Though he was an educational superintendent, Fanning made no move to denounce the inequality, even within his schools. During the time he held his position, no person of color served on the school board or was hired as a teacher as seen in the censuses done during that period. In a 1981 interview, his son later recalled having gone to a KKK rally when he was just a child.
As a “multicultural city of the world” Ban the KKK feels that having a school named after such a man is a bad example for the children of their community. A present pediatrician, Kris Potter Percy, expressed her worry using her medical knowledge as a background. She begged the question of what the child of color would think knowing that they school they go to honors a racist man. Children should be the number one priority and their mental health should be taken care of. She reminded the people at the press conference that children of color need to feel they are safe and they need to feel they belong.
Youth on the Move Inc’s CEO also preached a similar message. She told the story of when Martin Luther King Jr. was a child and was watching the TV with his father. When he saw an advertisement saying that all children would be given free ice-cream, he begged his father to take him to get some. “They don’t mean you,” his father said the words that would remain with him the rest of his life. With this story, the idea that children must be supported and that small steps must be taken to do so was further emphasized.
The group reminds everyone, however, that renaming schools like Fanning Elementary are only one part of the struggle.
Reverend William Moses Summersvilletime exclaimed, “It is time to stop this Klan behavior, stop the prison pipeline, stop excluding kids because the sundown town that was Brea-Olinda is no longer.” He asked that the board “change the name and don’t retain the hate.” Quoting African-American poet Maya Angelou, Summersville demanded change happen in the “Yet to Be United States of America.”
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