I was checking e-mails sent to me at my website recently when one from Hampton, Va. jolted me. “My name is Dr. Erenestine Harrison and I write to you with one question: Would Jews send their children to Adolph Hitler Elementary School?” The answer was a no-brainer, I thought. And having gotten my rapt attention, she went directly to the point.

“I write to inform you of my efforts to rename 2 schools in Hampton, Virginia. Robert E. Lee (the general who led the confederate army) Elementary School has a 95% black student population. Jefferson Davis (the president of the southern confederacy which fought to preserve slavery) Elementary School has a 67% black student population. Our black leaders have been muffled here and have not spoken out about this, but I know that Jewish people would not stand for it.”

Harrison, an educator, has a valid point. What’s in a name? Plenty. When I was growing up in Alabama, almost every city had a Black school named after Booker T. Washington. And for good reason. At least, good reason for the all-White boards of education. Despite his contributions to education and establishing Tuskegee University, let’s not forget that Washington was an accommodationist. In fact, he defended racial segregation in his famous “Atlanta Compromise” speech. On Sept. 18, 1895, Washington said, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand is in all things essential to mutual progress.”

As a W. E. B. DuBois admirer since my teenage years, I always wondered why, in all of my travels throughout my native Alabama during the 1960s, I never came across a W.E. B. DuBois high school or elementary school. That was by design. DuBois was uncompromising on the issue of racism and White school boards in the South were not about to name a school after him. Even now, not many Black-controlled ones outside of his native Massachusetts have honored DuBois in this manner.

In the name of integration, my old high school – Druid High – is now called Central High School-West in Tuscaloosa, Ala. It’s not called that by graduates because to us, it was and always will be Druid. Although Druids were part of an order of priests in ancient Gaul and Britain who, according to legend, were exceptional prophets and sorcerers, that’s not how my school got its name. Tuscaloosa, located 57 miles southwest of Birmingham, was called “the Druid City,” we were told, because of its famous oak trees.

However it got the name, we were proud to say we attended D-r-u-i-d High School. It was the best built high school in the state for Blacks (identical to the cross-town Tuscaloosa High, which was for Whites), and Black students visiting would marvel at our block-long, brick school that featured two libraries.

Would I feel the same way if my school had been named after a confederate general? Definitely not, although the school and its teachers would have been the same. I can’t imagine sticking my chest out to boast that I had attended Robert E. Lee High School. (Believe me, there were plenty of them around for White students). And that was the writer’s point. She wasn’t just whistling Dixie.

“Young children identify with their school,” Harrison wrote. “How must these children feel when they realize that the school that they go to is honoring a man who wanted to keep them in slavery, with no rights whatsoever as a person. It has to involve some psychological denial.”

And she says the denial extends beyond the children.

“The mayor of Hampton, Mamie Locke, is black and she has said nothing,” Harrison says. “Dr. Steve Harvey, president of an elite historically black university, Hampton University, has said nothing; our superintendent of schools until last year was a black man, Dr. Billy Cannady, but he said nothing; and the principal of Robert E. Lee is a black woman, Mrs. Stovall who has said nothing.”

I called Harrison [she doesn’t mind receiving e-mails at AfAmFemEren@aol.com] after receiving her correspondence. She is determined to continue her petition drive to get the name of the schools changed. Harrison told me on the phone, as she had written in her e-mail, “I’m stressing that this is not a campaign of hate or anger – just that a change is needed.”

And the change should not be limited to Virginia. If we can’t get one of the Black Booker T. Washington schools re-named for DuBois, at least we should have his name replace that of confederate rebels.