NEWS School Losing Confederate Soldier’s Name Written by
DOYLE MURPHY
T
he Confederacy loses again. After a years-long battle, Kennard Classical Junior Academy will become Classical Junior Academy, losing the reference to the Civil War lieutenant for the southern army, Veiled Prophet founder and St. Louis businessman Samuel Kennard. The school will eventually be
renamed to honor a different figure, apparently one without a racist past or involvement in a weird and creepy pageant that sends a bizarre message to students. Betty Wheeler, the pioneering Black education leader who founded Metro High School, was a popular choice on a previous petition in 2018, but that part hasn’t been settled yet. But Samuel Kennard is out — news first reported by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Kennard served in the Confederate Army as aide-de-camp to General Nathaniel Bedford Forrest, who served as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. In St. Louis, Kennard took over his dad’s carpet company J. Kennard & Sons and built a fortune. He moved in St. Louis’ circles of wealth and privilege, which manifested in the Veiled Prophet, the exclusionary secret society that chose for its early imagery a figure that loo suspiciously like an armed klansman. Kennard’s legacy has long been a problem for the Northampton magnet school. The Post-Dispatch
The sign still says Kennard, but the magnet school is getting a new name. | DOYLE MURPHY wrote about the controversy in 2015, and the RFT reported on a petition drive in 2018. Schools Superintendent Dr. Kelvin Adams suggested temporarily changing the named to Classical Junior Academy for the 2020-21 school year while a permanent
Mark McCloskey to Speak at RNC, Of Course Written by
DANNY WICENTOWSKI
I
t was inevitable. The circle of bullshit that began when a rifle-toting Mark McCloskey yelled at a group of protesters in the Central West End to “Get the hell out of my neighborhood!” has arced through cable news, tabloids and the city prosecutor’s office, and it has finally come to lodge itself where it belongs: next week’s Republican National Convention. Indeed, the fact that Mark and Patricia McCloskey — the now-infamous “St. Louis gun couple” — initially tried to play themselves off as supporters of the Black Lives Matter movement is just one more punchless punchline in the joke that is 2020. “The Black Lives Matters movement is here to stay, it is the right message, and it is about time,” one of the McCloskeys’ attorneys, Al Watkins, said in a statement released June 29, a day after the scene of the couple pointing guns at protesters went viral and made national news. Two months later, on Monday, Watkins confirmed to Wake Up to Politics creator
Mark McCloskey defended his home from peaceful protestors this June. | THEO WELLING Gabe Fleisher that Mark McCloskey “will be in full oratory splendor at the RNC.” Oh, how the worms turn. In the weeks after the couple’s armed confrontation, the case became yet another noxious node of the culture war, as Republicans (including President Donald Trump) showed just as little trigger discipline as the McCloskeys in jumping to support the couple’s noble stand
7
against, you know, unarmed people standing in the street. It didn’t matter that the couple’s claim of a gate-smashing horde was refuted by video evidence; it didn’t matter that the couple had, as the St. Louis PostDispatch revealed, waged a decadeslong legal war on their neighbors, or that Mark McCloskey had pulled a gun in a previous circumstance where he was
riverfronttimes.com
name is being decided, according to the Equity and Inclusion Committee, a group comprising parents and teachers at magnet school. he issue finally made it to last week’s school board meeting for approval. n not in danger, but rather establishing by force what he believed were the bounds of his property (sidewalks be damned) in the ultra-wealthy and private enclave of Portland Place. Let’s also not forget about the Rosh Hashanah beehives, which in 2013 had the misfortune to be placed by a synagogue near the McCloskey mansion and which Mark McCloskey destroyed in a rage of entitlement. “The children were crying in school,” Rabbi Susan Talve recounted to PostDispatch reporter Jeremy Kohler. “It was part of our curriculum.” Those bees deserved better. And St. Louis certainly deserves a better representative at the national political gathering. Still, Mark McCloskey is the guy the Republicans want on stage: an entitled lawyer who, like his wife Patricia, is facing a felony charge for unlawful use of a weapon; a guy who has demonstrated himself as an easily flustered boomer with an overcompensating arsenal and an underdeveloped sense of empathy, a guy who sees other people as a threat to his cavernous edifice to unfathomable wealth. Huh. You know, it suddenly makes a kind of sense. The McCloskeys are perfect representations of Trump’s Republicans, and we wish them the best. Have a great convention, y’all. Don’t come back too soon. n
AUGUST 19-25, 2020
RIVERFRONT TIMES
7
