The time has come to change the names of Cass Technical High School and Wayne County to the name of Jean Baptiste Point du Sable, says 1971 Cass Tech alumnus George Cushingberry Jr.
Cushingberry favors replacing their names because of the racist history toward slaves and native Americans by General Anthony Wayne and Lewis Cass. General Wayne made himself famous by slaughtering native Americans and turning the #Detroit river red with their blood as he was taking their property. Lewis Cass treatment of slaves was a documented disregard for human rights and, their quality of life.
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| George Cushingberry Jr. |
Replacing their names with Point du Sable will a decisive action to repair many years of hurt and disrespect to people who did not have a voice or a choice in their quality of life.
The background on of Jean Baptise Point du Sable from Wikapedia:
From Wikapedia:
Point du Sable was of African descent, but little else is known of his life prior to the 1770s. During his career, the areas where he settled and traded around the Great Lakes and in the Illinois Country changed hands several times among France, Britain, Spain and the new United States. Described as handsome and well educated, Point du Sable married a Native American woman, Kitiwaha, and they had two children. In 1779, during the American Revolutionary War, he was arrested by the British military on suspicion of being an American rebel sympathizer. In the early 1780s he worked for the British lieutenant-governor of Michilimackinac on an estate at what is now the city of St. Clair, Michigan north of Detroit. Point du Sable was a prominent
As noted in EBONY magazine in 1963
[Point du Sable] is not yet honored in his own house (which Chicagoans call the "Kinzie House") or on his own land. No street bears his name and, save for the high school, he has no monument. Cadillac is honored in Detroit, Pitt in Pittsburgh, Cleveland in Cleveland—but the father of Chicago has no street or statue of stone to call his own.
Ebony, December 1963.[67]
From Wikapedia - General Anthony Wayne
On August 20, 1794, he mounted an assault on the Indian confederacy at the Battle of Fallen Timbers in Maumee, Ohio, which was a decisive victory for the U.S. forces and ended the war. Wayne then continued to Kekionga where he oversaw the construction of Fort Wayne. He then negotiated the Treaty of Greenville between the tribal confederacy and the United States, which was signed on August 3, 1795. The treaty gave most of Ohio to the United States and cleared the way for the state to enter the Union in 1803.
If you support this name change, George Cushingberry strongly recommends that you vote in August and November to elect school board members and, county commissioners that will take action instead of passing the buck of responsibility.
