TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Leaders of a Kansas school district that is named for an early 20th century Ku Klux Klan leader have created an advisory task force to consider a potential name change.
The Topeka Capital-Journal reports that the task force will provide a report, but not a recommendation, to the board for the Seaman district in Topeka.
The issue gained attention after student journalists at Seaman High School used newspaper clippings from the 1920s to confirm last fall that the district’s namesake, Fred Seaman, had been an “exalted cyclops,” or chief officer, in the Topeka KKK.
A few dozen students, teachers and community supporters protested Monday, demanding change, before the board decided to create the task force.
“The district would be more welcoming,” said student Shennen Pineda-Ortega, a first-generation daughter of Hispanic immigrants. “Students of color would no longer have to wear the word Seaman on their chest acting like its nothing, even though in the back of their heads, they would know this person would have hated us and other minorities.”
But other people, including a group of mainly older alumni who spoke during the board’s public comment period, argue that for them, the Seaman name has been a symbol of their time and pride in the historically rural school community.
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