True Left

Success:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/01/10/sir-francis-drake-primary-school-renamed-following-black-lives/

Sir Francis Drake Primary School will be renamed in light of the seaman’s “slave trade links”.

The famed navigator became an English national hero for helping to defeat the Spanish Armada in 1588, but his legacy was reassessed following Black Lives Matter protests, and his connections to slavery have made him a contentious figure.

The Sir Francis Drake school in south London will be renamed “Twin Oaks Primary”, its headteacher has announced, informing parents:  “The slave trade links associated with the current name sat at odds with the values of our school.”
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Drake was knighted by Elizabeth I in 1581 having inflicted a series of naval defeats on the Spanish in the Americas and circumnavigated the globe, but before these exploits he took part in voyages with his cousin Sir John Hawkins which saw the capture of black African slaves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Drake#Slave_trade

Between 1560 and 1568 Drake served as a seaman on a series of voyages on the ships of his second cousin, Sir John Hawkins, with whom he had been brought up.[22][19] On these voyages Hawkins is widely acknowledged to have begun the English slave trade. The West African slave trade was at this time a Portuguese and Spanish monopoly, but John Hawkins devised a plan to break into that trade, and in 1562, enlisted the aid of colleagues and family to finance his first slave voyage.[23] Drake, 12 years junior to Hawkins, was part of the crew and is mentioned by name in the records.[19][better source needed] They carried slaves, cloth, manufactured goods and contraband.[24]

For his second slave voyage Hawkins gained Queen Elizabeth I's support, she allowed him to charter one of her ships, Jesus of Lübeck, and the rest of his needed capital came from a consortium of investors from her court.[25] Drake was twenty (circa 1563–1564),[20][26] and not a member of that consortium but the crew would have received a share in the profits.[27][28] Based on this association, scholar Kris Lane lists Drake as one of the first English slave traders.[29]

The Spanish and Portuguese were aggrieved that the English had entered into the slave trade and were selling slaves to their colonies, despite being forbidden from doing so. Queen Elizabeth I, under pressure to avoid an armed conflict, forbade Hawkins from going to sea for a third slave voyage. In response he set up a new slave voyage with a relative of his, John Lovell, in command.[25] Drake accompanied Lovell on this voyage.[25] In 1566–1567, Lovell attacked Portuguese settlements and slave ships on the coast of West Africa and then sailed to the Americas and sold the captured cargoes of enslaved Africans onto Spanish plantations.[30] The voyage was unsuccessful and more than 90 enslaved Africans were released without payment.[31][32]

Drake accompanied Hawkins on his next slave voyage. The crew attempted to capture and kidnap the inhabitants of a village near Cape Verde, but had to retreat. Hawkins recruited a local king in Sierra Leone to help him forcibly kidnap people, capturing and enslaving over 500 people before setting sail for the Spanish West Indies.[33]
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In the Magellan Strait Francis and his men engaged in skirmish with local indigenous people, becoming the first Europeans to kill indigenous peoples in southern Patagonia.[56]
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Drake became a member of parliament again in 1584 for Bossiney[13] on the forming of the 5th Parliament of Elizabeth I.[93] He served the duration of the parliament and was active in issues regarding the navy, fishing, early American colonisation, and issues related chiefly to Devon.

Other successes in removing his name:

Several landmarks in northern California were named after Drake, beginning in the late 19th century and continuing into the 20th century. American historian Richard White has claimed that these commemorations have origins in Anglo-Saxonism,[115] a racist ideology that was variously used to justify manifest destiny, imperialism, slavery, nativism, and the genocide of indigenous peoples.[116] Public scrutiny of these memorials intensified after the murder of George Floyd, when protests against police brutality and racism drew critical attention to place names and monuments connected to white supremacy. Several California landmarks that commemorated Drake were removed or renamed. Citing Drake's associations with the transatlantic slave trade, colonialism and piracy,[117][118] Sir Francis Drake High School, in San Anselmo, California, changed its name to Archie Williams High School, after former teacher and Olympic athlete Archie Williams. A statue of Drake in Larkspur, California was also removed by the city authorities.[119][120] Multiple jurisdictions in Marin County considered renaming Sir Francis Drake Boulevard, one of its major thoroughfares, but left the name intact when they failed to reach a consensus.[121] In San Francisco, the Sir Francis Drake Hotel was renamed the Beacon Grand Hotel.[122]

https://www.yahoo.com/news/school-named-violent-white-supremacist-100010871.html

Two days after a tightly contested election in the fall of 1898, a white supremacist mob descended on Wilmington, North Carolina — a Southern oasis of Black prosperity during the Reconstruction era — to take back the city from “Negro rule.”

The rioters razed long-standing Black businesses, burned down the city’s only Black newspaper, and overthrew a mixed-race, democratically elected city council in what is considered the only successful coup in American history.

More than a century after scores of Black residents were killed in the insurrection, Wilmington named an elementary school after one of its ringleaders: Walter L. Parsley.

No one protested when school board members approved Parsley’s name in 1999, and the tribute survived for 21 years. But by summer 2020, local activists had connected the name to one of the coup’s leaders, stirring fury and a petition drive to change it.
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What happened in Wilmington in 1898?

In the nights leading up the 1898 statewide elections, Parsley and eight other co-conspirators planned the government takeover at his Market Street home, according to a 1936 pamphlet by local journalist Harry Hayden.

As reporters at the local Black newspaper — the Daily Record — began writing up election results on Nov. 10, 1898, exactly 124 years ago, about 500 white businessmen and Civil War veterans, armed with rifles and racial animosity, barged into the paper’s headquarters and set the building ablaze. The insurrection then swelled to 2,000-strong across town, as the attackers spread now-debunked rumors that Black journalists had fired first.

But the coup wasn’t discussed much otherwise or a regular part of history lessons. On purpose.
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So as Confederate monuments fell like dominoes nationwide, all remained quiet in Wilmington, until a petition in June 2020 to rename the school drew more than 2,500 signatures.

That was the trigger. The following month, an unknown perpetrator vandalized a sign at the entrance to then-Parsley school. In bold red spray paint, the message read: “Rem[em]ber 1898, change the name” on one side, and “BLM” on the other, with a giant “X” through Parsley’s name.

Local civil rights organizations began to rally around name changes — both for the Parsley school and for Hugh MacRae Park, which was named for another architect of the massacre.

“For a young black child to go to a school that was named after someone who imposed a massacre killing black people, that has a psychological effect,” Sonya Patrick-AmenRa, an organizer for Wilmington’s Black Lives Matter chapter, told Port City Daily.

Thank you BLM!

But for all of the fervor around name changes in Wilmington, racial tension still pervades the city and the school system. Black residents say they still feel the sting of 1898, which significantly reduced the city’s Black population and wiped out the thriving business class.

New Hanover County Schools remain among the most segregated school districts in the country. What used to be Parsley Elementary is more than 80% white and stands down the street from a row of multi-million dollar houses, while schools only a few miles away educate mostly minority students from lower-income families.

For Maxwell, the NAACP chapter president, the name changes are a step in the right direction, but merely one step toward true racial justice.

You will need:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/true-left-vs-false-left/firearms/

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11292687/US-Army-rename-nine-forts-named-Confederate-generals-cost-63-million.html

The US Department of Defense has announced it will rename the nine US military bases that bear named of officers of the Confederacy.
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The nine Army bases that will soon bear new names are Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort Bragg, North Carolina; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Rucker, Alabama; Fort Polk, Louisiana; and Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Pickett, and Fort Lee in Virginia.
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Former President Donald Trump previously took a strong stance against the idea of renaming Confederate bases, going so far as to threaten to veto the Defense Spending bill in order to prevent the move from happening.

In 2020, he pushed Congressional Republicans to refrain from voting for an amendment introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to strip the bases of their Confederate monikers.

Let's keep up the momentum!

Another country that needs renaming which we had previously missed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antigua_and_Barbuda

The island of Antigua was originally called Wadadli by Arawaks and is locally known by that name today; Caribs possibly called Barbuda Wa'omoni. Christopher Columbus, while sailing by in 1493, may have named it Santa Maria la Antigua, after an icon in the Spanish Seville Cathedral. The "bearded" of Barbuda is thought to refer either to the male inhabitants of the island, or the bearded fig trees present there.[19]

I was reminded of it by this article:

https://us.yahoo.com/news/caribbean-nation-vote-removing-king-101858703.html

Antigua and Barbuda, a commonwealth country and former colony of the British empire, will hold a referendum on becoming a republic and removing King Charles III as the head of state, its prime minister announced.

Prime Minister Gaston Browne told the UK's ITV: "This is a matter that has to be taken to a referendum for the people to decide."

"This is not an act of hostility or any difference between Antigua and Barbuda and the monarchy, but it is the final step to complete that circle of independence, to ensure that we are truly a sovereign nation."

No, removing Charles as head of state is not even close to the "final step". You have to rename the country itself. Also, you have to stop doing uniquely Western things like "hold a referendum" and "becoming a republic". Why not re-install pre-colonial monarchies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cacique

The Taíno word kasike descends from the Taíno word kassiquan, which means "to keep house".[5]
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Most importantly, the kasike's word was law and they exercised this power to oversee a sophisticated government, finely involved with all aspects of social existence.[9]

Additionally, Browne needs to stop wearing Western clothes:

I suspect that the name Turtle Island is a recent innovation masquerading as an ancient name rather than something authentically predating the colonial era. If Turtle Island refers to North America only, that would require (in order for "Island" to be accurate) North America to be separated from South America by seawater, which was not the case prior to the Panama Canal (built during the colonial era). But if Turtle Island refers to North and South America combined, there is no indication that any pre-colonial travellers journeyed the entire circumference of the landmass, which is what would be required to ascertain that it is indeed an island. On these grounds I rarely use this name.

We sorted this out ages ago:

https://trueleft.createaforum.com/issues/name-decolonization/msg5614/#msg5614

https://news.yahoo.com/patrick-henry-high-mpls-name-002700943.html

Patrick Henry High School will be getting a new name, after the Minneapolis school board on Tuesday directed the school community to begin the name change process.

The school board's school names advisory committee, which was formed in 2020, had recommended a name change for the North Side high school because Patrick Henry — an 18th-century Virginia politician and leading proponent of independence before the Revolutionary War — owned enslaved people.

According to the resolution approved Tuesday, "students, staff, and community members recognize the need for a school name that better represents the values of the community."
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Two other schools in the district, Sheridan Elementary and Jefferson Elementary, were respectively renamed Las Estrellas and Ella Baker this year. The process to change those names began in 2020.

Sheridan was named for Gen. Philip Henry Sheridan, a Civil War officer who led the relocation of Native Americans off the Great Plains and encouraged the extermination of buffalo. Jefferson was named for the founding father and third U.S. president who owned slaves.

Keep up the good work!

Rightists will never get it:

Some school alumni vocally opposed the name change, arguing that it amounted to rewriting history

No. Rewriting history would be, for example, covering up the fact that Henry was a slave owner. We are doing the opposite.

Finally more attention here:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/welcome-to-aotearoa-the-campaign-to-decolonize-new-zealands-name-11658914200

The first European contact with indigenous Māori ended with four sailors killed and a hasty retreat. But it led to an identity for this South Pacific country: Nieuw Zeeland in Dutch, or New Zealand when it later became part of the British Empire.

Now, some lawmakers want New Zealanders to drop a name that harks back to an era of colonization and adopt another—Aotearoa, a Māori word referring to the clouds that indigenous oral history says helped early Polynesian navigators make their way here.
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In New Zealand, the issue is coming to a head because a petition to rename the country Aotearoa—pronounced ‘au-te-a-ro-uh’—garnered more than 70,000 signatures and will be considered by a parliamentary committee that could recommend a vote in Parliament, put it to a referendum or take no further action.

“It’s a realignment to where we are as a nation,” said Rawiri Waititi, co-leader of the Māori Party, a small party in Parliament that supported the petition. “It’s nothing to be afraid of.”

Over several decades, Aotearoa has become more common in everyday speech. It appears on bank notes and passports, and is often in government documents, either alone or combined with New Zealand. When the U.S. and New Zealand issued a joint statement following a meeting of their leaders in May, it referred to Jacinda Ardern as prime minister of Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori is one of three official languages in New Zealand but fluency has plummeted, a legacy of colonial-era policies that restricted its use.

Ms. Ardern welcomes the wider use of Aotearoa, but a formal name change isn’t being explored by the government, a spokeswoman for the prime minister said.
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Opinion polls suggest advocates of a new identity face an uphill battle. More than half of respondents want to keep New Zealand, according to one survey by market-research company Colmar Brunton. Still, Aotearoa alone or Aotearoa New Zealand command about a combined 40% support.

Everyone who wants to keep "New Zealand" should be treated the same way as those Dutch sailors mentioned in the first paragraph.

Those sailors were led by:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abel_Tasman

Abel Janszoon Tasman (Dutch: [ˈɑbəl ˈjɑnsoːn ˈtɑsmɑn]; 1603 – 10 October 1659) was a Dutch seafarer, explorer, and merchant, best known for his voyages of 1642 and 1644 in the service of the Dutch East India Company (VOC). He was the first known European explorer to reach New Zealand and the islands of Fiji and Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania).

which reminds us that "Tasmania" also needs to have its name changed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasmania#Toponymy

In the reconstructed Palawa kani language, the main island of Tasmania is called lutruwita,[25]
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Tasmania is named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman, who made the first reported European sighting of the island on 24 November 1642.