French officials in the capital region have opted to change the name of a high school named after Black activist Angela Davis.
Valerie Pecresse, the conservative head of the Paris region, accused Davis of having views that “feed communitarian feeling and can encourage violence.” She also criticized Davis’ belief in the idea of systemic racism existing in France while speaking to a committee in March. The right-wing conservative denied that systemic racism exists in France and said “a certain number of recent declarations about France pose a problem.”
The school was opened in 2017 and is host to about 1,200 students in a largely Black community in the Saint-Denis area of northeast Paris. The school and local mayor elected to have the school named after Davis.
Davis, 79, is a former Black Panther and became known in the 1970s after she was accused of complicity in an courthouse escape attempt while fellow activist George Jackson was on trial for killing a prison guard.
The guns used in the August 1970 incident at the Marin County Courthouse, in which the trial judge and Jackson’s younger brother Jonathan Jackson were among those killed, were registered in Davis’ name.
A “Free Angela Davis” movement was started, and she spent 18 months behind bars. She went on to become a voice for the Black community and women and served as a professor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, where she taught courses on the history of consciousness.
Pecresse pointed to a letter signed by Davis and other academics in 2021 that accused the French state of having a “colonial mentality.”
“In Angela Davis’s thinking there’s the conviction that racism is systemic,” Pecresse said in March. “This may be true in the US, it was certainly true in the US. But in France it’s false and this idea, which could be supported by minority groups, is really an attack on French republican universalism.”
Her statement came before police killed a teenager of Algerian origin on the morning of June 27 during a traffic stop. The incident sparked violent riots and accusations of racism by security forces. It also led to many prominent sports figures, such as soccer star Kylian Mbappe, and public figures to speak out against racism.
On Wednesday, the Pecresse administration elected to rename the school after Rosa Parks. This decision came months after of disagreement between local teachers and administrators.
Education Minister Pap Ndiaye, a Black former academic and expert on race relations, opposed the move. He said “a lot of names of schools and education facilities are drawn from a vast range of references that don’t necessarily create a consensus.”
