From Haight to Love: Renaming an Alameda Elementary School in an Era of Racial Reckoning

On Dec. 5, 1867, California Governor Henry Huntly Haight used his inaugural speech to rail against the citizenship and voting rights of formerly enslaved Africans, Native Americans, and to oppose immigration from Asia. On December 5, 2017, 150 years later, Rasheed Shabazz contacted the Haight Elementary School PTA and encouraged them to initiate the process to rename Haight School. A year and a half later, the Alameda school board voted unanimously to adopt the name: Love Elementary School. As part of our Hidden Histories series, Shabazz will discuss the campaign to rename Haight and how public history is an opportunity to build relationships and highlight bigger structural issues in communities.

Speaker Bio:
Rasheed Shabazz is a multimedia storyteller, urban planning historian, and youth development professional based in the Bay Area. He was born in Oakland and raised in the West End of Alameda, California. Rasheed studied African American Studies and Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley. He is currently completing his Masters in City and Regional Planning at Berkeley. He is currently working on a book about the history of African Americans and housing in Alameda.

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