RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) - School leaders in North Carolina have voted to change of the name of a school that was named after a lifelong white supremacist and newspaper publisher.
The Raleigh News & Observer reports that Wake County school leaders voted to remove the name of Josephus Daniels from a Raleigh middle school.
The county school board took the vote on the same day that a statue of Daniels was removed from the city.
School board members cited Daniels’s role as publisher of The News & Observer to help overthrow the city of Wilmington’s multiracial government in 1898.
The school will be renamed Oberlin Middle School. The school is on Oberlin Road. The name also honors a community that former slaves founded.
In addition to being a publisher, Daniels was a former U.S. Navy secretary. The statue had been in Nash Square before his family removed the monument.
The monument will be put into storage. The statue came down in the wake of protests that have followed the death of George Floyd, a black man who died in police custody in Minneapolis.
Demonstrators have been rallying against police brutality and systemic racism. And Confederate monuments have been coming down throughout the South.
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