From The Wild Wild West Department:

Take That, Tom!

The New York Sun reports that a move is afoot in Berkeley, Calif., to change the name of Jefferson Elementary School, because the third president owned slaves. A familiar enough story, but this one reaches whole new levels of complexity. The proposed new name for the school is Sequoia Elementary, "but even with that name, the school district cannot quite dodge the slavery connotations":

Some community members have pointed out that under Chief Sequoia's leadership in the early 19th century, the Cherokee nation owned more than 1,500 black slaves. A spokesman for the Berkeley Unified School District, Mark Coplan, acknowledged that Chief Sequoia "presumably owned slaves and was rather barbaric," but he emphasized that the proposed new name would honor the sequoia tree, not the Cherokee leader.

The school conducted a vote of parents, teachers and tykes on what new name to propose. "Sequoia narrowly beat out the second-place candidate, Ohlone, which would have honored a California tribe." But wait, aren't Indian names supposed to be offensive?

"Other names rejected in the April vote would have paid tribute to the abolitionist Sojourner Truth, black diplomat Ralph Bunche, Mexican-American labor leader Cesar Chavez, and Berkeley's late rent-board commissioner, Florence McDonald." Luckily, Berkeley's late rent-board commissioner already has a fast-food chain named after her.
(Thanks to Best of the Web Today