School named after KKK leader asked to change its name
Nathan Bedford Forrest (nps.gov)
In the you-can’t-make-up-this-stuff category: A petition on change.org with some 75,000 signatures is asking a Florida school district to change the name of a high school that is named after Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general and the first “grand wizard” of the Ku Klux Klan.
And, according to Marsha Oliver, chief of communications for the Duval County School District, it doesn’t matter how many people sign the petition because the process for changing a school’s name is community-based and the ultimate decision resides with the school board.
The school board was formally asked five years ago to change the name and refused, but the membership has changed since then.
The school was named after Forrest when it opened with white students only in 1959, a name suggestion that came from an organization called the Daughters of the Confederacy. Now, more than half of the school’s students are African American.
(It should be noted that there is another Nathan Bedford Forrest High School in the