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Wednesday, July 8, 2020

LeConte departing from Berkeley, but not UCLA

When you enter UCLA from Westwood, you encounter the name LeConte, although with a space after the "Le." The street was named after two brothers associated with Berkeley. As we have noted in prior posts,* Berkeley is in the process of changing things named after the LeConte brothers:

From SFGATE: The (UC-Berkeley) Building Name Review Committee is reviewing proposals to remove the names of Joseph and John LeConte... from campus. The renaming of LeConte Hall seems almost a foregone conclusion; the faculty of the Department of Physics already overwhelmingly voted in favor of removing the name in mid-June. The LeConte brothers grew up on a plantation with 200 enslaved individuals and, when the Civil War broke out, they used their scientific acumen to help the Confederacy manufacture gunpowder.

After the war, Joseph LeConte used his platform as a respected natural scientist to advocate for white supremacy. He argued Black people were inherently inferior and called "the sudden enfranchisement of the negro ... the greatest political crime ever committed." In his work, he fought for what he perceived as racial purity. "I regard the light-haired blue-eyed Teutonic and the negro as the extreme types, and their mixture as producing the worst effect," he once wrote. "… It seems probable then that the mixture of extreme races produces an inferior result." The LeConte name was already removed from a Berkeley elementary school in 2018...

Full story at https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/UC-Berkeley-may-rename-halls-15391117.php

Of course, Le Conte Avenue (or LeConte Avenue - depending on which street sign you look at) is not part of the UCLA campus and it would be up to the City of LA to change the name which would inconvenience - and possibly raise objections from - homeowners and businesses on that street.
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*(2015) http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2015/07/uh-oh-street-name-coming.html and (2017) http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2017/11/coming-soon-to-westwood.html.
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UPDATE: NWWNC votes to rename Le Conte Avenue, citing namesake’s racist past
https://dailybruin.com/2020/07/06/nwwnc-votes-to-rename-le-conte-avenue-citing-namesakes-racist-past

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