Biloxi elementary school honoring Confederate leader will be renamed
Jeff Davis Elementary School, named for the president of the Confederacy and a Mississippi senator, is getting a new name, the Biloxi School District announced Monday.
The district is currently surveying staff and parents for suggestions for a new name.
Options will then be presented to a renaming committee comprised of staff, parents, and representatives of Keesler Air Force Base and the broader Biloxi community. District spokeswoman Jennifer Pyron said Superintendent Marcus Boudreaux hopes to complete the process by November.
“This is an opportunity to ensure that every student and staff member feels welcome in his or her school,” Biloxi School Board president Jim Wallis said in a statement. “We appreciate the renaming committee members’ time and efforts to help us with this change as we move forward and continue to provide excellent education opportunities to the children of Biloxi.”
Pyron said Boudreaux began planning the name change process in July. The survey launched in August and remains open for community members to submit ideas.
Jeff Davis Elementary was built from 1960 to 1961, and opened as white Mississippians were engaged in “mass resistance” to the Civil Rights Movement. Around the South, schools were often named to honor Confederates in the 1950s and 1960s, as a way of demonstrating opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that segregated schools were unconstitutional.
The first Black students arrived at Jeff Davis Elementary in August of 1964. A group of Black parents, led by civil rights leader Dr. Gilbert Mason, had won a victory at the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals earlier that year, which required the district to desegregate “with all deliberate speed.”
The two first graders were among the 16 Black children who desegregated Biloxi’s elementary schools that day. Because Biloxi’s school year started a bit earlier than two other Mississippi districts also under court orders, Biloxi was the first Mississippi school district to desegregate.
Today, about 18% of Jeff Davis students are Black, according to data from the Mississippi Department of Education. About 11% are Hispanic or Latino, 56% are white, and 9% are two or more races.
Davis, who owned slaves, was an ardent defender of slavery and white supremacy. As a Mississippi senator, he gave a speech to the United States Senate in 1860, calling slavery a form of government for people who “by their nature are not fit to govern themselves.”
“We recognize the fact of the inferiority stamped upon that race by the Creator, and from cradle to grave, our government, as a civil institution, marks that inferiority,” he said.
Discussions about renaming schools, streets and other landmarks honoring Confederate leaders and soldiers have intensified in recent months, following national protests against police brutality and racism after George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis. In July, the name of the Biloxi branch of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Community College was changed from Jefferson Davis Campus to Harrison County Campus.
According to an analysis by Education Week, as of June 2020, there were at least 211 schools named in honor of men tied to the Confederacy, spread across 18 states. Eleven, including Biloxi’s Jeff Davis Elementary, were in Mississippi. Education Week found that since the end of June, at least 11 school names had been changed.
Most of the Mississippi schools bear the name of the county in which they’re located, which in turn are named for a Confederate leader, including Forrest (General Nathan Bedford Forrest), George (Colonel James Z. George, later a leading advocate for Black disenfranchisement) and Jefferson Davis Counties.
In 2017, the name of Davis Magnet IB Elementary, a Jackson school serving mostly Black students, was changed to honor Barack Obama.
