Austin ISD Poised To Rename Confederacy-Named Schools

AUSTIN, TEXAS — Austin ISD board members appear poised to rename, in short order, two schools honoring Confederacy figures, according to reports.

A majority of trustees at their Monday meeting expressed willingness to rename Zachary Taylor Fulmore Middle School after Sarah Beth Lively, who taught at the campus for 25 years, the Austin American-Statesman reported. In addition, trustees favor re-naming John T. Allan Elementary School in honor of Anita Ferrales Coy, a former principal and district administrator, according to the report.

The board is scheduled to vote on the proposed new names at its Oct. 29 gathering. Trustees originally voted to rename the schools in February.

The names of three other Confederacy-named campus slated for re-naming — Sidney Lanier Early College High School, John H. Reagan Early College High School and Eastside Memorial Early College High School at the Johnston Campus (named for Albert Sidney Johnston) — are expected to remain the same for the time being, the newspaper reported.

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Renaming of Eastside Memorial has been postponed until after its relocation and reconstruction at the original L.C. Anderson High School site, according to the report. Moreover, trustee Ann Teich previously complained not enough residents in the area of Sidney Lanier High School within her district were unable to provide input, pushing the renaming of that school until November, the newspaper reported.

Following is biographical information on the five figures of the U.S. Confederacy after whom the schools slated for re-labeling are named:

• According to the Texas State Historical Association, Zachary Taylor Fulmore (1846–1923) was a lawyer and judge who was born in Robeson County, N.C. He began studying at Bingham's School in North Carolina but quit in 1864 to enlist in the Confederate Army as a private in Company D, First Battalion, North Carolina Artillery. He was captured at Fort Fisher in January 1865 and held prisoner until May. After the war he completed his studies at Bingham School and in 1867 entered the University of Virginia, where he received a law degree in 1870.
• The Texas State Historical Association also provides biographical information on John T. Allan (1821-1888). Sometimes called the "Father of Industrial Education in Texas," he was born in Edinburgh, Scotland before attending public schools in Edinburgh and Inverness and was apprenticed to a German cabinetmaker in the latter. He left Scotland around 1842 and landed in New Orleans, where he worked as a bookkeeper for a cotton plantation near Alexandria, La. He then moved to Arkansas and studied law before acquiring title to land in Texas and settling in Nacogdoches, where he worked as a carpenter and wheelwright. He moved to Austin in 1850, opened a law office two years later and serving as justice of the peace beginning in the early 1850s. In 1863, Allan left for Louisiana and became an officer in the Confederate Army.
• The Poetry Foundation describes Sidney Clopton Lanier as "...one of the finest poets produced by the South in the nineteenth century," putting him on par with Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville. While the website glosses over his involvement in the Confederacy, Lanier served in the Confederate States Army as a private. According to Wikipedia, he fought in the American Civil War, primarily in the tidewater region of Virginia where he served in the Confederate signal corps.
• John Henninger Reagan (1818 – 1905) resigned from the U.S. House of Representatives when Texas seceded from the Union, and joined the Confederate States of America. He later served in the cabinet of Jefferson Davis as postmaster general.
• Albert Sidney Johnston (1803 –1862) has the distinction of being the highest-ranking general killed during the Civil War, according to the American Battlefield Trust. In December 1860, Johnston took command of the Department of the Pacific but resigned when his home state of Texas seceded from the Union. He later arrived in Richmond in September, and his long-time friend, Jefferson Davis, made him a full general and commander of the Western Department. In a battle against Gen. Ulysses S. Grant's army, he was shot in the same leg that had sustained nerve damage after he was shot during a previous duel against Texas Brigadier Gen. Felix Huston. On the battlefield, Johnston was alerted to the extent of his injury after his boot filled with blood, according to the website biography. He quickly bled to death on the battlefield, a tourniquet in his pocket.

A national movement to rename buildings named after figures of the Confederacy was sparked in earnest after a violent September 2017 rally by white supremacists in Charlottesville, Va. led to the death of a counter-protester. White supremacists had staged their rally in protest of a proposed removal of a Confederate monument.

>>> Read the full story at Austin American-Statesman

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Image: Albert Sidney Johnson via The New York Public Library Digital Collections, public domain