Today, Explained - KKK High

Episode Date: April 7, 2021

A group of students in Topeka, Kansas, discovered their high school was named after an exalted cyclops of the Ku Klux Klan. Then they tried to change it. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Visit connectsontario.ca. email from a young listener. His name was Forrest. He lived in Topeka, Kansas. The subject line read, my school is named after a KKK leader. Forrest said he and some of his fellow students were organizing a movement to change the name of the school, and they were hoping we might be interested to hear more about their effort. And we were. Our reporter, producer Halima Shah looked into it for us. At the center of Topeka, Kansas, is Monroe Elementary School. It's a wide brick building, almost 100 years old, and it was reserved only for Black students. But today, there aren't any students there at all, because the school is a national monument, and its classrooms are exhibitions that recall one of the most pivotal legal decisions in the U.S. Topeka is the home of Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that declared

school segregation unconstitutional. If you talk to enough educators and students from Topeka, you'll notice that being the genesis of the case is a point of pride. But just eight miles north of that monument is Seaman High School, home of the Vikings. It's a mostly white school in a suburban, somewhat rural part of Topeka. And this school is named after Fred Seaman, a member of the Topeka, Kansas Ku Klux Klan. His association with the Klan had been rumored for years, but last year, a century after the school was founded, it became more than hearsay. Back in the summer of 2020, after all the Black Lives Matters protests had started happening, there was an alumni

who decided to go to the Kansas Historical Society and dig around. And there was an article relaying that Fred Seaman was connected to the Klan. Madeline Gerhart writes for The Clipper, Seaman's school newspaper. She was one of the student journalists who took the alumni's research and ran with it. When she dug deeper, she confirmed that Fred Seaman was not only associated with the KKK. His position was an exalted cyclops. There's not a well-defined word as to what an exalted cyclops is, but essentially it is the head leader of a local clan.

And we basically assume that clan to be the Topeka area clan. Back in the 1920s, Fred Seaman was kind of a local celebrity. He was an elementary school teacher and principal. He was part of the local masonry group. He ran a minstrel show at the high school. He was a county attorney who supported prohibition. He ran for state superintendent at least twice. He was someone with power and influence.

We saw these articles that were depicting him as a Klan leader. And we ended up learning that he had endorsed Klan tickets. It was basically a way of showing that Klan values were being put onto the ballot whenever people were going into the elections. And so right outside of an election office, I'm pretty sure that they were handing out these little, I think it's like a four by four square that had his endorsement on it. It's not clear if Seaman was part of lynchings, cross burnings, and some of the most horrific acts

of racial terror that the Klan was responsible for. Madeline says that haziness about his activity is what some of Seaman's defenders point to. Some people think he was a part of the Klan just to boost his agenda for elections. Other people claim that he was a part of it because of prohibition. And the Klan was very much against alcohol consumption. Here is what we do know. The KKK had several local chapters in Kansas at the time. We know somewhere around 40,000 people were Klansmen. They burned crosses. They drove through Black neighborhoods in sheets and hoods. They donned blackface. They had a problem with a growing number of Catholics. Madeline published her findings with her fellow editor in October of 2020.

And the impact was beyond anything she expected. We had people praising us for bringing out this information. And we had other people on the opposite end of the spectrum who were telling us that we opened a can of worms. It was just polarizing opinions. A bunch of students decided to take action. They used a snow day in February to organize. They're big academic achievers, I know that, and so they're always busy. So the fact that they had this free time, they just took it and ran. They were like, you know, we need a petition. We're going to make a petition. We need social medias. We're going to make social medias. We're going to make an email. And we're just going

to start with that and build from the ground up. Rene Cabrera is one of those high achievers. He's a sophomore. My role in the movement is really to be a person who's connecting the community. The movement has t-shirts. They read, Same History, Stronger Future. They also have a GoFundMe and some demands. As of now, my demands are making sure

that we are both going to change the school name and also at the same time, we're going to work towards being an inclusive school. We're going to get more people of color teachers to teach in our public schools. We're going to have a safe place where people of color can showcase their culture. Since the article came out, students have held rallies outside the district office. They've launched a petition with about 80,000 signatures, and they've talked to the local press. Just one of the many things heard today as students in the Seaman School District rallied together to stand up for what they believe in. Pushing to change the district's name, hoping to leave their mark and make a difference.

We want them to set up a set deadline and a set plan that says, this is when we're going to vote, this is when we're going to talk about this, you know, to change the name. The school board promised to consider the students' demands, but said they've been held up by the pandemic. They did, however, hold a town hall. Several students and teachers backed the name change, and several parents and alumni didn't. Racism starts in the home, with parents. It doesn't start with the name of a high school, Seaman. As far as Fred Seaman, he means nothing to me.

Even though my grandfather and my great-grandfather knew Fred semen. I mean, I don't know whether they had any knowledge that he was in the KKK, but I don't stand for the KKK. I stand for the word semen, which means a lot to thousands. And I know that we can't put a price tag on it, but the ugly truth is that we have to put a price tag on this because these funds have to come from somewhere. And if you just look around this gym, just this gym right here, how many things are going to have to be changed that we're going to have to put money into? And then I would ask you, if we can put money into that, why haven't we put money into paying our teachers more? You guys don't realize how many thousands of letter jackets and everything are out there. Just something simple like that with semen on it. And then we'll probably, I hate to see it named the North Topeka slugs or something. I don't know

what they're going to come up with. I do believe that that money that would be spent on changing the name could be better spent on educating students, families, and our community about issues of equality and organizations such as the Klan. Let's not blow up the whole ship just because Fred was a dummy. I reached out to district leadership for comment. The superintendent sent a statement saying the district was forming an advisory committee on this. And the school board referred me to the Kansas Leadership Center, the group that's guiding the advisory committee's work. We will hold the first gathering of the committee

in the coming few weeks. Ed O'Malley is president and CEO of the Kansas Leadership Center. They haven't worked on namesake issues before, but they've been arbiters in communities on issues like police and gun control. They will hold a series of retreats over the coming months.

At each retreat, they will spend time in diagnosis, thinking about what's going on in the community. What do they know? What do they not yet know? And then between those retreats, they will help facilitate opportunities for community engagement and creating environments for people to be heard and to listen. He doesn't think it's his place to say whether or not Seaman schools should change their name. But he does think it's a valid discussion, and it's one that's going to take a while.

The superintendent, I think, wisely set a long boundary, almost up to a year, I believe, that he'd like this resolved by. It could be resolved much sooner, or perhaps we'll use that entire year. In other words, the committee's work is just getting started and a lot is TBD. But I asked Ed what his message is to students who say, deciding whether or not to rename a school named after a KKK leader shouldn't be a very difficult decision. To the student's point, they might be correct. It might not be a hard question.

And the process is still really important to make sure this is a process that builds community bonds rather than deepens community divisions. Ed said Topeka is one of many namesake debates happening around the country. And he thinks there are a lot of things driving them. It seems to me one of the dynamics at play is we have such rapid change in our society today with how we think of things, what we view as norms, even the rapid change in technology. There's so much rapid change. And I think always throughout time, there have been differences among demographic

groups, especially age demographic groups, of how quickly a change is adopted. The number of non-white students at Seaman schools has doubled over the last 20 or so years, from 10% in the 1990s to 20% these days. Rene is one of those students at Seaman High. He's openly gay and Mexican-American in an overwhelmingly white, somewhat rural, and close-knit community. For students of color, we feel like we've been beaten down so much by just about how the school district has been run through so many occasions, like, for example, myself being called the F slur by students. It's a lot for other students getting asked, what's your race? Or

do you have a green card? But there's so much to it. There's students not feeling included in things just because they're different from others. At our school district, the races that hang out together, there's the Hispanic community that's always together, the Black community that's always together, and then there's the whites. And if you're thinking name-calling, slurs, clicks, that all kind of just sounds like high school, Rene says racism at Seaman goes far beyond that. There's past instances where we had, like, a student say he would lynch a bunch of Black people and say the N-word with a hard R. Other students I spoke to talked about swastikas in the bathroom, homophobic slurs, the fact that

students wore Blackface in minstrel shows as recently as the 1950s. It's enough to make students like Rene consider changing schools. I don't know if I can continue to be here if Fred Seaman is still being honored at our school district. And I'm doing so much for the school district with, you know, becoming presidents of state organizations or being a part of leadership programs around the state, it's really hard for me to continuously represent school district when for so long it feels like the same hate that Fred Seaman is like spewing back in the past is the same hate that I'm getting in my classroom. Ed O'Malley hopes that an open discussion about Seaman Schools brings the community together and convinces students like Rene that there's room for him in the district.

I hope by engaging in that process and being a part of figuring this question out, it'll help students feel more connected and feel like they are helping move the district in the direction they need. There's no telling how long this process will take. Students like Renee, as well as Forrest, who was the one who emailed the show, are going to have to wait for an answer. But they're not alone, because students across the United States have been fighting the exact same fight. The nationwide fight to rename schools honoring legendary American racists, in a minute, on Today Explained. Thank you. Support for today explained comes from Ramp. Ramp is the corporate card and spend management software designed to help you save time and put money back in your pocket. Ramp says they give finance teams unprecedented control and insight into company spend. With Ramp, you're able to issue cards to every employee with limits and restrictions and automate expense reporting so you can stop wasting time at the end of every month.

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Okay, as Halima mentioned a minute ago, these students in Topeka, Kansas are going to have to wait to find out if they can finally change the name of their school from Seaman to something else, which might be befuddling for a whole host of reasons, but it's actually sort of par for the course in the United States. Yeah, it's happening in many places across the country, and it has been for the better part of a decade. This is Corey Mitchell. He writes about education at the Center for Public Integrity. When you have these demographic shifts, you have new people come in, and they really question

whether or not this school name really reflects their values and what they stand for. So in many places across the South and even stretching throughout the Midwest, you've had these debates about how schools should be named and whose schools should be honoring. And tell me a little bit more about these demographic changes and how they might be some of the reason, at least, behind this trend. You have places like Kansas and states across the South that have seen more Black residents move into certain communities, more Latino residents move into certain communities, more Asian residents move into certain communities. And you may have these places that are named after Confederate figures or people who have ties to the KKK. And people say, you know, well, I understand that being a Confederate or being a member of the KKK

was acceptable decades ago. But now we don't, that's not cool. And we don't want to go to a school named after these people, no matter whether you just view that sort of thing as a character flaw or as sort of a moral issue. And this isn't so much to do with the Black Lives Matter protests of last year. This is more a trend that sort of predates that particular social movement? Well, we did see a rush in many places to address these issues, notably in places like Virginia and Texas. But I mean, much of this started after the massacre in South Carolina and sort of the issues with the Confederate flag there. Post Charlottesville, there was another sort of rush to address this.

So I think there are these big cultural moments where people question the history of race in America that really lead us to think about, you know, the importance of what we name our public spaces. Tell me about a school like for Nathan Bedford Forrest. He was a Confederate general in the Civil War and was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, sparking a very passionate debate over the years. The school was renamed, but I mean, he also has communities in Arkansas that are named for him and the schools in those communities are almost exclusively Black. It's just tougher to rename a community than it is a set of schools. So this is an issue that's going to have a very long tail. Is that what we find when we look at this issue in the aggregate, that it occurred over time and the shift in values and the shift in our understanding of history and who should be praised and who should not. Across the South, mostly, there are still close to 200 of these schools that are named for

Confederate generals. I mean, there's a group of roughly two dozen schools that are named for folks who came out in opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. And how have efforts to rename those schools gone? There's been no traction there. I mean, these are members of Congress. These are people who are esteemed. And there's a lot more connection to these people when you talk about Strom Thurmond. Traditional American values have been cast aside by the so-called liberal forces in our society. He was many things, but he was, you know,

sort of carried many of the ideas of the Confederacy into the middle of last century and even beyond. I call upon those who are confused and disillusioned by this situation to go back to the noble elements and principles of our traditions and find their inspiration there. He led a filibuster against, you know, civil rights legislation and was also the man who drove congressional opposition to the Brown v. Board of Education decision. Governor Thurmond attacks the civil rights plank.

It simply means that it's another effort on the part of the president to dominate the country by force and to put into effect these uncalled for and these damnable proposals he has recommended under the guise of so-called civil rights. And I tell you, the American people on one side or the other had better wake up and oppose that program. He's generally known as a racist, but he also has this background where he was the school superintendent in this community. He had a secret black daughter that no one knew about until after his death. So he has this very complicated history with race, but he is viewed as like the foremost segregationist of the modern era. And what's he is named for him. And at the time of the school being named for him was a time when there were a lot of

desegregation efforts across the country. So his community in South, this community in South Carolina closed the all black school and forced a merger of the schools and people from every part of this community were upset. The black families, the Black families, the white families, and they took action in different ways to try to address this. But in many ways, there's still lots of resentment and anger even, you know, close to 50 years later now. So is that school still named after Strom Thurmond? Yes, it's still named after Strom Thurmond. There was a big lawsuit in the 1970s from Black students who said, you know, well, they're playing Dixie after we scored touchdowns.

The fight song, the mascot is a reference to the Confederacy. And ultimately, that lawsuit went nowhere. Part of it was because of Strom Thurmond's ties in the communities and how much he was beloved. And there's actually a state law that the school can't be renamed. And it was signed by a governor who would go on to become the Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton. So he was a Democrat. And, you know, he was, Strom Thurmond was so beloved in South Carolina,

he said, yeah, well, let's go ahead and sign this law that says that the name of the school can never be changed. Are there examples of this that don't feel as rooted in deeply problematic and deeply complicated history? Are there more frivolous attempts to change the name of high schools or elementary schools or middle schools across the country? That seems to be the case in San Francisco. San Francisco is renaming 44 schools following a controversial decision by the school board there. They voted six to one to scrub the names of, for instance, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln from the school buildings. Supporters of the measure say

these historical figures have links to slavery and racism and oppression. Even a school named after Senator Dianne Feinstein made the list. As mayor of San Francisco, you see, she replaced a Confederate flag that was vandalized outside City Hall. And that's faced some pushback from people asking if it's going a little bit too far. But it's also something that started in the middle of a pandemic. And people are questioning whether or not this is the most important thing to be doing now. You know, understanding that their schools haven't been open for the past year and students have been learning remotely. Some don't have access to devices. And even the mayor there has said, OK, let's stop here and let's focus on what's important. The mayor's statement reads in part, quote, What I cannot understand is why the school board is advancing a plan to have all these schools renamed by April when there isn't a plan to have our kids back in the classroom by then.

I'm glad you actually brought up the situation in San Francisco because I think there was news this morning that they're going to suspend that effort. And I kind of wonder, seeing that, if trying to remove Washington's or Lincoln's names from schools gives ammunition to people who want to make this a culture war instead of an honest reckoning with the country's atrocious history. Yeah, I mean, it is tricky. I mean, some of these, the more recent surges and the push for school renaming, it's been very clear that it's been tied to issues of hate and, you know, Confederate flags and things like that. But when you start talking about these people who very much represent what we think of as, you know, the United States flag, I mean, it does become more complicated. You know, and I think there is a better understanding that there is a more

complicated narrative with the U.S. president. It seems less clear-cut or more clear-cut, I should say, for people with ties to the Confederacy. You were actually waging war to maintain the institution of slavery. Have we learned anything through, as you said, a decade or so of these movements to rename schools and districts and even towns, it sounds like, when to do it and when not to do it? Or is it still case by case and subject to heated debate and, you know, dog whistles about cancel culture and this and the other? It largely depends on the community.

And in many of these places where you're seeing these schools named for Confederate generals being renamed, there have been these significant demographic shifts. These places that were once all white communities are now majority black communities. I mean, so there is sort of that public support. But where you have not seen those shifts, I think many people have said, you know, well, this isn't that important. It's just a school name. But I think that this is part of a much larger conversation that we're seeing about education and representation, who's leading and teaching in schools, what's being taught in schools. And then, you know,

also what we're talking about now, whose schools are named for. And I don't think there's ever going to be a resolution on all of this. There's going to be progress depending on what side of the argument you're on. But I think that we will see over time like more you know really deep debate about what this all

means and its importance because it can't really address some of the larger issues around the achievement gaps the the equity gaps, the funding issues in school, the discipline issues. So I think it's going to go on and on. Corey Mitchell, he's a senior reporter at the Center for Public Integrity. You can find his work at publicintegrity.org. Thanks to Halima Shah for bringing us the story from Topeka, Kansas. Thanks to Madeline Gerhart for her reporting at the Seaman Clipper School newspaper. For now, you can find the paper at seamannews.com.

And thanks to Forrest for emailing us in the first place. You, too, can get in touch with us just like he did. Our email is todayexplained at voox.com. you