Opinion: Unmerited Idolatry: A diverse school with a bigoted namesake

Opinion by Aaron Kershaw

How do you see Napoleon Bonaparte? What do you know of him? How has your traditional education or pop culture references depicted him as a man, leader, or conqueror? Have you learned about his triumphant battles in his quest to colonize Europe and the British Isles? Have you read about the legendary "Battle of Austerlitz," in which he ended the Holy Roman Empire? Or is he simply a punchline in a joke about a small man's insecurities, AKA "Napoleon Complex"? I guess it depends on where you stand. Conquerors have the luxury of writing history for the following generations, and pride or contempt of a conqueror depends on what side of the conqueror's sword you were on.

Archiving his storied career as evidence of his greatness, French painter Jacques-Louis David honors Napoleon's victories in his work. His paintings, appropriately for his point of view, illustrate Napoleon as a distinguishably revered and accomplished French leader.

Francisco Goya: The 3rd of May 1808 in Madrid, or “The Executions”

However, Spanish painter Francisco Goya depicts Napoleon's "achievements" as the terrible atrocities the colonized so often decipher their colonizer to be. Who could blame a grade school student in France for thinking Napoleon was great? After all, writing how you wish to be remembered is the perk of a conqueror once you've adequately extinguished the resistance to your reign.

That begs the question, how did the side that lost the war for America's soul somehow become the side with the right to tell the story? Confederate monuments, which emerged in great numbers decades after the Civil War, were an attempt not just to control the narrative about the war but also to depict those who fought for the "lost cause" as heroes. Generals and elected officials of every rank hailed as champions for defending their state's rights to brutalize my people are the names of military bases, statues, cities, streets, and even schools.

The latter is why I'm writing this. I no longer want my children to walk into a school named after someone who thought them to be less than human. 

My children: (L to R) Kingston, Zollie, and Kit

John Tyler Elementary School in Washington D.C. is the namesake of John Tyler, the tenth president of the United States. I have three children who attend the school, and since DCPS has a pre-k program, all of them have attended Tyler Elementary since they were three years old.

Today, my oldest is nearly eleven and will soon graduate, leaving his two brothers, who will be nine and seven years old by May, behind at Tyler for a few more years. I've served on the PTA and advocated to bring Kindred DC into the school, a nonprofit organization that focuses on making our schools equitable for all.

Finally, I am an active parent in my children's education. I've taught them not to honor this man and reject what he represents, but that is hard when you can't mention the school's name without uplifting the unmerited idol.

 "His Accidency," as his party members dubbed him for being the first Vice President to seize the presidency due to a sitting president's untimely demise, had perhaps the harshest record on slavery imaginable since he betrayed his country to protect the inhumane institution.

He attended William and Mary near my hometown. I grew up in Newport News, Virginia, where learning about bigoted people in history is just part of the game. Still, if you wanted to know who these "heroes" truly were, it required your intellectual curiosity to investigate, which I had in spades and did extensively.

As a congressman, Tyler shot down the legendary Missouri Compromise on the grounds that states should get to decide whether to enslave people. He regularly voted against regulations on slavery in the new territories because he wanted slavery to spread through the then underdeveloped new nation. Not just an ideological bigot, Tyler had “skin in the game” as an enslaver who profited from the hard work of 40 to 50 enslaved Africans. Additionally, Tyler wrote in a letter to his son that abolitionists "deserve the deepest curses of the patriot, for having put in jeopardy the noblest and fairest fabric of government the world ever saw." Slavery is neither noble nor fair, and conflating "patriotism" with being pro-slavery is an unfortunate comparison but is shamefully more American than apple pie.

Besides being a bigoted man, he was an awful president. His party attempted to have him impeached for not adhering to the party platform that he and 9th President William Henry Harrison had run. After failing in his run for a second term and retiring to his Virginia plantation, the Civil War arose in the early 1860s. Tyler made the treasonous vote for Virginia to secede from the Union and was elected to the Confederacy House of Representatives because his racist beliefs were in line with those who wanted Africans to remain enslaved, even at the cost of whatever honor or patriotism you would expect from a former president.

So the name of this bigoted, accidental president whose death went unrecognized by the federal government because he was a traitor is written all over the walls in a highly diversity-driven school in Washington D.C. with a Spanish program and an African American population of over 65%.

My children deserve better than bigots on their school t-shirts. They deserve better than celebrating traitors that broke the oath of the pledge of allegiance they make every morning. DCPS has added more bureaucratic red tape to the school renaming process in light of our campaign and other ill-named schools in the city. Today, I ask that they either step aside to allow or step up to help the "Tyler Elementary School" community to pick a name that doesn't taste like tyranny when you speak it.