For many generations and for many families, Roosevelt High School has been an important anchor of history. For many students, teachers, and alumni, there are very deep connections with Roosevelt and its community. Roosevelt has been open for about one hundred years so it makes sense that it has a deep connection with the community. Regardless of that, many students have expressed some concerns with some other history surrounding the school, mainly the name and the mascot.
To give some background, Roosevelt High School was built in 1922 as a replacement for James John High School which was built in 1911. Roosevelt High School is named after President Theodore Roosevelt to honor him after his passing in 1919. Our mascot, The Rough Rider, which is a horse, was also named to honor him. The name Rough Rider came from Theodore Roosevelt’s First U.S Volunteer Cavalry. Our sports and academic teams were henceforth known as the Rough Riders or Riders for short. While presidentRoosevelt favored many racist policies including the forcible removal on Native Americans in order to establish the United States Forest Service as well as dedicating five national parks on native land, he also held very strict views on Black people. In a 1906 letter to a friend he wrote “As a race and in the mass they are altogether inferior to the whites”.
There have been some disparities including the sport’s teams being the Rough Riders and the Lady Riders when women’s sports teams became popular. There has been an attempt to bring the Lady Riders back to some of the women’s sports teams, but we are unsure if they plan to continue with that. The only conversations I’ve heard about said name revival have been between newspaper staff.
All together the history of Teddy Roosevelt is quite harsh and cruel and as a school that is majority people of color, it’s shocking that we have not addressed this as a whole. Students during the 2022-23 school year looked into changing the name and mascot as a Senior Inquiry project and put up QR posters around the school to try to get student engagement on the topic but to no avail. There was a point and time where a name change was brought to the Roosevelt Alumni Association but they are very avid in their beliefs of not changing the name. I was able to sit down with the vice president of the alumni association, Jim Kennison, to gain some perspective on their side of this debate. Jim, like many others, has very deep connections to the school. He said that the reason many alumni are so against the idea of the name change is because it’s connected to the history of this community. He was able to give some background history and photos to show why they love it so much. I asked his opinions on some topics pressing the students including the disparities between sports teams and his opinions were similar to those of the students but not completely. The alumni, for one, are against the name and mascot change, but understand where students are coming from.
Many students, including myself, don’t think that the name nor the mascot fairly represent our school’s diverse population. We understand that a complete name and mascot change is a big task and frankly speaking undoable in my short time left in high school but I want to open up the conversation so that students who go to Roosevelt after I graduate can attend a school they are proud of.
https://www.history.com/news/teddy-roosevelt-race-imperialism-national-parks
