Tacoma’s Wilson High School needs a new, non-racist name. This choice is perfect
Sorry, Woodrow Wilson, but it looks like you’re on your way out of Tacoma, 100 years after leaving the White House. And with your eponymous exit from the nameplate of Wilson High School will go the racist legacy of America’s 28th president.
It didn’t take a retroactive election or posthumous convening of the Electoral College to dislodge the two-term president from the 62-year-old Tacoma high school.
All it took, during an election year when America’s long struggle with systemic racism came to the fore, was a thoughtful, months-long reckoning led by a committee of Wilson alumni, students, parents and educators.
The committee met eight times and conducted an online survey of Wilson stakeholders. It delivered its recommendations last week to the Tacoma School Board and Superintendent Carla Santorno.
Two options were presented: Rename the school after an extraordinary Black female leader, or retain the Wilson brand but drop all association to Woodrow.
Presumably a third option is for Santorno and the board to dismiss the committee, thank members for their service and stick with the status quo. But surely that’s not going to happen.
Not at a historical moment when close scrutiny is being applied to Wilson’s record and Princeton University dropped his name from its school of public policy. Not this year, after a springtime awakening, when a group of Wilson High alumni brought their concerns about the ex-president to the school’s Black principal, who brought them to the district’s Black superintendent.
The odds are about as likely as Wilson’s ghost showing up at the next school board meeting, renouncing his Ku Klux sympathies and apologizing for his resegregation practices as president.
The school should be renamed in honor of Tacoma’s Dolores Silas. The naming committee identified Silas, now in her 90s, for her pioneering work as the first Black female administrator in Tacoma Public Schools and the first Black woman to serve on the Tacoma City Council, back in 1991.
The former DeLong Elementary School teacher and principal touched countless lives. She’d make an excellent replacement for a president whose only connection to Tacoma was giving a speech at the Armory, in failing health, on Sept. 13, 1919 — Day 10 of a cross-country barnstorm tour in which he tried to build support for the League of Nations.
Silas is a better choice than the other woman of color whom the committee identified: Ruby Bridges, a nationally known education-equality activist. Bridges, from New Orleans, lacks Silas’ compelling local profile.
As for retaining the Wilson label minus any overt Woodrow references, this strikes us as the least satisfying alternative — a nod to brand consciousness without solving the underlying problem.
There was talk on the committee of creating a “hall of different Wilsons who better represent the tradition of the school,” but this seems as random as creating a gallery of Johnsons, Thompsons or Smiths.
Keeping the name but ditching the person for whom it was named isn’t nearly as natural as it was for King County; in 2005, it swapped former slave-owning vice president William Rufus de Vane King for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
The Tacoma committee prefers the Silas option, and it’s easy to see why. She exemplifies the very things that too many of our presidents resisted (including Franklin Pierce, for whom our county is named): racial justice and the emergence of strong Black leaders.
Like most US presidents, Wilson had a complicated record on diversity and equity. He was a hero to Jewish Americans for breaking down walls, such as nominating the first Jew to the Supreme Court, but a promoter of segregationist views and prejudicial policies against African Americans. The impact of his administration — good, bad and ugly — should be preserved through institutions like the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library in Staunton, Virginia.
But the Tacoma School District has no duty to keep his name alive. Certainly not if students who wear that name feel shame instead of pride.
“I don’t want to be a representation of something that’s racist and putting other people down; I know that’s not what my school stands for,” Indigo Hill, a Wilson Ram and Tacoma School Board student delegate, told the board last week. “I’m really glad that somebody saw that and spoke out.”
Wilson Principal Bernadette Ray is compiling cost estimates of items that would need to be changed. Those will be forwarded to the superintendent, who will make a final recommendation to the school board.
We hope transition plans are in place by the time the COVID-19 scourge relents next year and students are fully back on campus.
The term “alma mater” is Latin for “nourishing mother.” May Dolores Silas become the first woman to serve as spiritual avatar for one of Tacoma’s five comprehensive high schools.