School Named for Justice Marshall

Oxnard’s newest elementary school is to be named after Supreme Court justice and civil rights pioneer Thurgood Marshall, district leaders have decided.

The ease of the decision contrasts sharply with last year’s battle to rename a city school after a Latino.

At the urging of more than 50 black educators and community leaders earlier this week, school board trustees unanimously agreed to rename the district’s 20th campus after Marshall, who died in 1993.

Scheduled to be built in Oxnard’s northwest community, the school tentatively had been named La Colonia Elementary.

But with little fanfare and even less dissension, board members agreed Wednesday to a name that better reflects the district’s ethnic diversity.

“We were strictly business and totally professional; we didn’t go in there to raise the roof,” said Oxnard resident John Hatcher, president of the Ventura County chapter of the NAACP. “We wanted the board to recognize that African Americans are also part of this community.”

Board members said afterward that Marshall was the perfect choice for the new campus, given his lifelong mission to outlaw segregation and champion civil rights.

“I think it was the right thing to do,” said trustee Francisco Dominguez, who heads the Latino advocacy group El Concilio del Condado de Ventura. “It’s a way of recognizing the contributions that African Americans have made and represents a new era of thought within the Oxnard school district.”

It hasn’t always been that easy.

Oxnard has an elementary school named after labor leader Cesar Chavez, but board members last summer found themselves caught up in a racially tinged controversy over the naming of a new east Oxnard school.

Trustees had agreed in 1994 to name the school after former school Supt. Norman R. Brekke. But last year, Latino activists petitioned board members to change the name, arguing that Brekke hindered efforts to integrate schools in the 1970s.

Several Latino leaders suggested that the campus be named after Juan Laguna Soria, who in a 1970 lawsuit forced the district to integrate schools in the city’s La Colonia barrio.

Before his death from a heart attack in June 1997, Soria had been urging trustees to drop the Brekke designation.

The controversy inflamed passions on both sides of the issue. After weeks of contention, board members agreed to retain the Brekke name at the east Oxnard school and to name the next new school in the city’s southeast side after Soria.

At the same time, the board agreed to name a third school--the one planned for the northwest community--La Colonia Elementary.

That decision didn’t sit well with many people in the African American community who had lobbied in 1994 to name the school after Marshall or Martin Luther King Jr.

“We believed that the third school was named in haste and didn’t take into consideration the desires of other people in the community,” said Deputy Public Defender Gary Windom, who was educated in Oxnard schools and who addressed the school board Wednesday night.

“There are very few opportunities to name a new school and when they occur it shouldn’t be done in haste,” he said. “We thought it was time, after all these years, to name a school after a prominent African American.”

At Wednesday’s meeting, African American leaders presented three choices to the board. Marshall and King were obvious favorites. But the name Rosa Parks--whose refusal to go to the back of a bus in Montgomery, Ala., sparked the civil rights movement--also was thrown into the mix.

In the end, community leaders said they would have been pleased with any of those names. What was most important, they said, was to provide a shining example for African American youngsters.

Nearly 5% of Oxnard’s population is African American, according to the 1990 U.S. census.

“This gives kids a role model that’s sorely needed,” said Frederick C. Jones, past president of the local NAACP branch. “And it recognizes someone who has done an outstanding job in getting us to where we are today.”

With the name changes behind them, board members said all that is needed now are land and money to build the new schools. Although the Brekke school opened in July 1997, Juan Soria Elementary and Thurgood Marshall Elementary are still in the planning stages.

But given the tumult of the past, trustees said, they are glad to have gone through the naming process without public acrimony or political infighting.

“The whole thing was very calm and quiet and that felt good,” said board member Susan Alvarez, noting that she voted in 1994 to name one of the new schools after Thurgood Marshall.

“To be honest, the original decision never really set well with me. In my opinion, this was long overdue.”