Cleveland State University’s law school named for a slaveholder should not be City Council’s concern: Justice - cleveland.com
CLEVELAND, Ohio -- With all the issues that dog our city, Cleveland City Council took on one that, frankly, ought to be left to others.
On the urging of Councilman Kevin Conwell, its loudest voice, City Council approved a meaningless resolution last month that called for removing the name John Marshall from the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law at Cleveland State University.
The reason?
Marshall, the fourth chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was a slaveholder.
Before a vote on the resolution, Conwell put my position on the law school’s name quite well, though his words don’t reflect the same meaning as mine do: “We shouldn’t, as African Americans, even have to write legislation to fight this.”
He’s right. He and fellow councilmembers should not have wasted a vote on what name is on the law school, even if, as Conwell put it, the Marshall name is a “black eye” on the school.
Applying a 2022 litmus test to Marshall — and other founders — seems an effort not worth the energy. To scrub Marshall from his place in judicial history makes Conwell & Co. look as if they’re trying to revise America’s origins.
Next up in their purge of Revolutionary War figures must be Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, all of whom have public schools here named for them. Would Conwell dare suggest that the names of George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and John Hancock come off every building that bears their names?
Few of the men who founded this republic didn’t own slaves, and the only early presidents who didn’t were John Adams and his son John Quincy Adams.
So, now, almost 250 years since land stolen or bought from Native Americans became the United States, we’re to pretend the republic was formed on the principle of equality of man.
Nonsense.
To suggest as much is to put truth in mothballs, pulling it out of the closet when it suits people’s purposes. We shouldn’t treat truth in such a flimsy fashion.
America’s history is what it is, and the white founders, doubtless, had their flaws. They were not like the traitors who tried to tear the nation asunder in the 1860s.
A person would be hard-pressed to name a single country that hails failed insurrectionists, which is the reason no Confederate soldier nor politician should have a statue or a brick-and-mortar structure erected in his honor.
Yet we have no option except to look at Marshall, Franklin, Henry and those white men of their era through a different lens. To erase all references to these men would be to paint a false narrative of America, a country whose inequalities persist even to this day.
Of course, I wish the founders had been abolitionists — men who abhorred involuntary servitude. I wish they were feminists, too. That’s not, however, the United States of the 1700s, which is my point.
Critics of the Marshall name must put more effort into explaining the history, of putting into context what America was when it was founded. The country, indeed, was an imperfect union.
Whether CSU drops the Marshall name ought not to concern Conwell or his council colleagues. They shouldn’t have spent a second on discussing it, because to do as they did took their focus off more salient matters, like making Cleveland a better place to live and work.
Justice B. Hill grew up on the city’s East Side. He practiced journalism for more than 25 years before settling into teaching at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.
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source: https://www.cleveland.com/opinion/2022/02/city-councils-priorities-should-not-include-pressing-cleveland-state-university-to-drop-slaveholders-name-from-law-school-justice-b-hill.html
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