Ghosts of the past

NOTE: This post has been substantially updated from the original tumblr post. In the summer of 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of the police in Minneapolis and the subsequent nationwide protests sparked wide-ranging discussions in many communities. In Lawrence, it renewed calls to change the name of a grade school that honored a key proponent of protections for slavery in the Constitution, and that controversy evolved into the name of the neighborhood as well. This post has been revised to focus on how the school’s name came to be, with all the subsequent elements about the original street name consolidated in the follow-up posts.

This is a special piece because I wanted to add a bit (well, a lot) to the conversation surrounding the name of Pinckney elementary school.

First: I don’t personally feel that the name must stay. I understand completely those who are are horrified by it, and I also know how strong sentiment and nostalgia can be for others, and how the name that has next to no connotations now, or personally, can be hard to simply release. At the same time, we re-examine and realign our cultural and historical priorities constantly in this country; for reasons important and mundane. (The names on the east-west streets were removed for convenience, essentially.) It’s 2020 and it’s OK to be updating our lists of people we want to bestow honors upon.

But more importantly, based on the history of the community and its earliest schools, it is highly unlikely that the school was ever deliberately named until well after it was built. Most likely its informal name was simply formalized. To me, what that means is we as a community have an opportunity to make a conscious decision about what message we want to send.

To see how Pinckney Elementary ended up with its current name, you have to look back to the time its first iteration was built. Lawrence had undergone a population boom in the immediate post-Civil War years, growing to over 8,000 people after having only had a population of 3,000 at the time of Quantrill’s raid. (It would take another 50 years to add the next 5,000.) Small schools were being expanded and new ones were being built between 1865 and 1873, and with one exception, they were known by the streets they were located on: Quincy (between Vermont and Massachusetts on what is now 11th street), New York (between what is now 9th & 10th streets), Vermont (between what is now 6th & 7th streets), and Pinckney (between Mississippi & Illinois on what is now 6th street). Only Central, located at Warren (9th) and Kentucky, wasn’t.

Multiple newspaper articles about their construction, opening and operations from the time note no special effort at naming, and when discussing them nearly always included “street” in the name. Quincy, Vermont and Central were closed and torn down over time, but Pinckney and New York remain, having formally taken on the names of their places streets in the process.

Of course, the sad truth about life in Lawrence at that time was that there was no need to subtly signal racist intent when one could simply do it openly. It is hard now to square the thought that the people of a town founded on the premise of combating slavery could be openly and casually racist, but it was pretty much the way things were. When looking for common uses of the school names in the papers, I came across this letter in response to an editorial comment regarding African American children at the then-segregated Vermont street school. This was barely eight years after the town had been burned to the ground for its opposition to slavery:

Yet all of this does beg the question - why would a town founded on anti-slavery even have a street honoring a prominent slaveholder from South Carolina in the first place? The answer is most likely that it didn't ever have a street named for a Pinckney, but for a Pinkney, as I go over in great detail in the next several blog posts