Brea School Board Moves to Change School Name After KKK Kontroversy
Residents, educators and activists finally inched closer this week to their goal of having William E. Fanning Elementary School in Brea renamed. The long, protracted battle met its turning point at Monday’s Brea School Board meeting where trustees expressed exhaustion over the year-and-a-half long debate surrounding Fanning’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920’s. But the fatigue proved unnecessary; the history surrounding Fanning, who served as superintendent of Brea schools for more than a decade, is solid. It’s a lesson a majority of trustees have refused to learn even as they moved towards having a vote on renaming the school site.
“I have read everything that I can read,” said trustee Paul Ruiz. “I’ve researched the documents I can find online. I checked Smithsonian Institute documents. I can not find this man doing anything–except being a great advocate for the city–building our schools.”
It didn’t help that the past board received a whitewash of a 13-page report on Fanning written last November by Linda Shay, museum curator for the Brea Historical Society. She claimed at the time that “no credible evidence” existed for the Rename Fanning Committee’s cause while trying to discredit former Weekly editor Gustavo Arellano’s historical journalism on Fanning and the Klan in Orange County as mere “editorial commentary.”
Fanning’s name appears on one of two lists of OC Klan members that Arellano based his award-winning historical series on–and that past District Attorney Alexander Nelson used to bust Klukkers. Shay previously criticized the scrolls of lacking “provenance” before historian and sociologist James Loewen of Lies My Teacher Told Me acclaim weighed in by criticizing the Brea Historical Society’s report as having been “poorly done” overall.
Read more: https://ocweekly.com/brea-school-board-moves-to-change-school-name-after-kkk-kontroversy/