Petition calls for renaming of city school

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This article was published 12/06/2020 (1967 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

CECIL RHODES was founder of the De Beers diamond company and a Prime Minister of the Cape Colony in southern Africa who created the prestigious Rhodes scholarship and had not one, but two Winnipeg schools named after him.

But Rhodes, who died in 1902, was also a British imperialist who paved the way for apartheid in South Africa and said in his will the Anglo-Saxon race was “the first race in the world.”

Now a Winnipegger has started a petition to strip Rhodes’ name from a Winnipeg elementary school.

Jill Sutherland, who started the petition on change.org a few days ago to ask the Winnipeg School Division to rename the 1570 Elgin Ave. school, and is close to reaching her goal of 500 signatures, says on the site she was shocked when she saw a school here was named after someone considered a white supremacist.

“I feel strongly that keeping this name in place is ultimately harmful and counter to the efforts to decolonize our schools,” Sutherland wrote on the website.

“My hope was that it would be a spark, and that momentum would build among the community to ask that the name of Cecil Rhodes be removed from this school, and that a process be started to rename it in a way that involves the community, and most importantly the staff and students, in this part of the school’s history.”

Sutherland said WSD trustee Jennifer Chen is on board and says she will bring the motion forward at the last board meeting before summer break to that there will be a chance for debate and community input in September.

According to the Manitoba Historical Society’s website, the two-storey school, named after Rhodes, was opened in 1909 for about 700 students. Just eight years later, the school was so overcrowded that another school, Cecil Rhodes School No. 2, was constructed nearby. The first school is now used as the Adolescent Parent Centre.