FORT SMITH -- An elementary school in the Fort Smith School District christened after a Confederate general is on its way to getting a new name.
The Fort Smith School Board on Monday unanimously approved a resolution expressing its intent to adopt a new name for Albert Pike Elementary School, at 4111 Park Ave., for the 2021-22 school year. The resolution directs the Fort Smith School District administration to organize a committee to develop and recommend a renaming process involving stakeholders from the school community.
The board had tabled the resolution during a meeting on Aug. 10 so it could give people a chance to comment. An abstract included in the packet for that meeting stated that Albert Pike Elementary appeared in an article in Education Week, a national publication based in Bethesda, Md., as one of six schools in Arkansas named after a Confederate figure.
"Documented activities and statements of General Pike as described in the attached resolution do not reflect the commitment of the school and the district as a whole to 'treat all people with dignity and respect' as articulated in the Vision 2023 Strategic Plan," the abstract stated.
"Essentially, the idea is that when you've got students who are coming to a school, that you want for those students to feel valued and respected," said Fort Smith School District Superintendent Doug Brubaker.
The resolution stated that Pike, a Confederate general, joined a petition in 1858 to "expel all free blacks from the State of Arkansas." He also wrote in 1868 that "We mean that the white race, and that race alone, shall govern this country. It is the only one that is fit to govern, and it is the only one that shall."
Members of the Fort Smith district's equity and minority recruitment committees discussed the name of Albert Pike Elementary School during a joint meeting July 31, according to the abstract. Their consensus was to recommend to the board that the school be renamed.
On Monday, School Board member Susan McFerran said she, as a white woman who learned Pike's background, felt that the board had no choice but to change the name of the school.
"The equity and the minority recruitment teams committee, it seems very diverse to me, a great group, and I'm very pleased with that," McFerran said.
Board member Wade Gilkey remarked that not only had no one on the board defended or spoken in favor of Pike even once, but that the vast majority of people in the community whom he talked to said the name change is the right thing to do.
However, Gilkey said his issue with it was the timing, which he described as "baffling."
"I mean, we're in the middle of covid, we're in the middle of a pandemic, and this is the moment that we've chosen to do this," Gilkey said. "And in my opinion, it's certainly distracted our focus from a lot of the really important issues that our parents and our teachers and our students have right now."
"To [board member Talicia] Richardson's comment from the last meeting, 'If we don't do it now, we could wait 100 years,' I don't think anybody was saying wait 100 years. I think it was, more or less, how about December? How about January? How about just give us enough time to digest and work through the issues that we're dealing with ... getting our kids back in school and getting the school year started?"
Monday saw one resident speaking in favor of changing the name and another voicing opposition to it during the community participation segment of the meeting.
Fort Smith is also home to a street named Albert Pike Avenue. Outside the River Valley, both the Albert Pike Hotel and the Albert Pike Memorial Temple can be found in Little Rock, according to the Encyclopedia of Arkansas.
Among other reminders of the late Confederate general's life was a statue of him in Washington, D.C., that was erected in 1901, the encyclopedia states. However, this statue was toppled June 19 of this year in the midst of ongoing nationwide protests in the aftermath of the death of George Floyd, a Black man who died May 25 while being restrained on the ground by a white Minneapolis police officer who pressed his knee into Floyd's neck for about eight minutes.
In 2015, the Fort Smith School Board decided to remove the Rebel as the mascot of Southside High School in the district and "Dixie" as the fight song out of concern that the Confederate symbols were offensive to some who equated them with racism.
The Mavericks was eventually chosen as the mascot's replacement by a committee.