Our lead story tackles the ongoing debate over historical figures long venerated by law schools, universities, monuments and other public memorials. San Francisco attorney and historian John Briscoe takes off from the recent “denaming” of UC Hastings College of the Law (now UC College of the Law, San Francisco) with a careful examination of the role California’s first chief justice and later attorney general, Serranus Hastings, played in the massacres of the state’s native population between 1834 and 1880. John also broadens his scope to address naming controversies at other universities and law schools. In so doing, he explores how various universities and professional organizations have struggled to weigh tradition with Americans’ changing understanding of our past.
Next, CSCHS board member John Caragozian explores the prosecution of 19-year old Yetta Stromberg, a counselor at a “red” summer camp. In 1929, during the so-called First Red Scare, the Southern California teenager was charged with raising a homemade hammer-and-sickle flag each morning, leading the children in pledging allegiance to it, and singing “Communist songs.” Stromberg was convicted of violating a California Penal Code section barring activities in opposition to “organized government.” Although the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately reversed her conviction, explicitly holding that the First Amendment’s free speech protections were enforceable against states and that “visual symbols like the red flag” qualified as speech, Stromberg’s case can be seen as a prelude to the Communist persecutions of the 1940s and ’50s.
For the complete TOC scroll down to the end of the pdf linked to above. Dr. Selvin adds, "We welcome comments from your readers — as well as their article ideas.” Write her at molly.selvin@gmail.com.
--Dan Ernst
