Opposing Valérie Pécresse, the Minister of Education Pap Ndiaye spoke out on Wednesday for the Angela Davis high school in Saint-Denis to keep his name. The president of Île-de-France had expressed her desire to change it.
“It does not seem appropriate to me to change the name of Angela Davis High School”, “a great figure in the civil rights movement, of which no one is obliged to share all the points of view, but who can nevertheless appear on the pediments of our schools, ”wrote the minister, seized by Valérie Pécresse on the subject.
Angela Davis’s positions called into question
At the end of March, the former LR presidential candidate had refused to endorse this name, yet chosen in 2018 by the school’s board of directors and validated by the mayor at the time, due to “recent positions taken by Angela Davis on France”. If the high school staff and the town hall do not find an alternative name within two months, Valérie Pécresse will propose in June to the regional council, which has authority over high schools, to ratify the name of Rosa Parks, she replied in a statement released Wednesday.
In 2021, the American academic, now 79, co-signed a column castigating the “colonial mentality (which) manifests itself in France’s governance structures, in particular vis-à-vis citizens and racialized immigrants, as evidenced by measures such as the dissolution of the CCIF (Collective against Islamophobia in France)” or “the law against wearing the veil”.
An establishment name “entered into use”
“Many names of schools and educational establishments draw, and for a long time, from a wide range of references which do not necessarily achieve consensus”, notes the Minister of Education, citing the Karl Marx or Yuri Gagarin schools. In addition, “many schools and establishments already bear the name of Angela Davis”, adds Pap Ndiaye for whom “the name of the establishment” of Saint-Denis has also “entered into use”.
The Minister, a teacher-researcher by training and a specialist in the social history of the United States and minorities, underlines the “deep attachment” for France of Angela Davis, whose stay in Paris in 1963 “was decisive in her subsequent political involvement.
Pap Ndiaye “chooses to kick in touch” and “looks away from the acute problems of respect for secularism encountered in some of our schools, including, in the past, in the high school in question”, estimates Valérie Pécresse. “The step of wave prevails over the protection of our republican ideals”, deplores the elected representative of the right.