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KamaAina

(78,249 posts)
Thu Oct 15, 2015, 06:06 PM Oct 2015

Berkeley School Board considers name change at Le Conte

October 14, 2015 11:00 am
by Delency Parham

Berkeley school officials are considering changing the name of Le Conte Elementary after community members raised concerns about its namesake, Joseph Le Conte, a deeply respected UC Berkeley faculty member and a passionate conservationist who helped found the Sierra Club ...

Joseph Le Conte was born and raised on his father’s plantation in Liberty County, Georgia. It was home to over 200 slaves. Le Conte’s father died when Joseph was 15, and left his estate to his children. As the years passed, Le Conte pursued his studies and helped run the plantation from afar. When the Civil War began, he served as a “consulting chemist” and was a key figure in the Confederate munitions industry ...

“Not only has the Negro been elevated to his present condition by contact with the white race, but he is sustained in that position wholly by the same contact, and whenever that support is withdrawn he relapses again to his primitive state,” he wrote. “The Negro race is still in childhood, it has not yet learned to walk alone in the paths of civilization” ...

In 1892, along with John Muir and others, Joseph Le Conte helped found the Sierra Club. One of his main concerns was the problem of resource exploitation, and how it could ruin the Sierra Nevada mountain range ...

http://www.berkeleyside.com/2015/10/14/berkeley-school-board-considers-name-change-at-le-conte/

h/t struggle4progress

News flash: There is also a Le Conte Avenue a couple of blocks north of the Cal campus.


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