American activist Angela Davis becomes focus of controversy in Paris region school (2024)

"It is neither up to the regional prefect nor up to the minister of national education to make a decision or approve a choice made by a community."

In a letter Le Monde was able to read, Pap Ndiaye, France's education minister, issued a clear rebuke to Valérie Pécresse, the head of the Paris region (Ile-de-France), who had asked him to take sides over the name of a local high school.

The high school of La Plaine, a neighborhood of Saint-Denis, north of Paris, was inaugurated six years ago but it still lacks an official name. Students, teachers, residents as well as the national education website refer to it as the Angela Davis high school, in a tribute to the American Marxist and feminist activist.

The school bears no signage around its premises and the lle-de-France region keeps designating it as the "Lycée [high school] de la Plaine." Legally speaking, it is up to the region to decide on an official name.

Pécresse, who chairs the Ile-de-France regional council, put the subject back on the agenda of her permanent assembly and suggested last month to name the 1,200-student school after Rosa Parks, another leading personality of the American civil rights movement, whom she felt was more consensual.

The high school's board had, however, approved the name of Angela Davis as early as May 2018, a choice that had received the backing of the mayor of Saint-Denis at the time. In a statement issued at the end of March, the high school teachers said they were "shocked" by the region's new proposal, adding they had not been involved in the decision in any way.

In the face of growing controversy, Pécresse postponed the decision and opted to refer the matter to the minister of education and the regional prefect.

'Simplistic'

The disagreement between Ndiaye and Pécresse goes far beyond a legal issue. According to the Ile-de-France leader, even though Davis waged "a courageous struggle against the abject segregationist system that existed in the United States," her "radicalism as an ex-Black Panther may appear too confrontational to embody the serenity that should prevail in a school."

The "systemic racism" that Davis fought against "was true in the US" but "is not true in France," she wrote in a letter sent to Ndiaye on March 31. Pécresse, a former candidate in the last French presidential election with the conservative party Les Républicains, believes that the thesis of systemic racism constitutes "an all-out attack on republican universalism [in France]," likely to feed "communitarianism."

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