African-American school trustee targeted for remarks on Confederacy name removals

At Wednesday’s board operations meeting for the Austin Independent School District Board of Trustees, Trustee Ann Teich requested that her colleague Trustee Edmund Gordon be censured for comments he made during a Martin Luther King Jr. Day speech concerning the board’s recent decision to stall the renaming of several school facilities that currently bear the names of Confederate military personnel. The Austin American-Statesman broke the story yesterday, claiming that Gordon had received a text message from Teich after his speech calling him a “coward.” Gordon had called the board “spineless” for dropping the momentum of renaming the schools at the Jan. 8 work session that he had missed. The board had planned to take a vote on the item during its February regular meeting, but the consensus at the work session was to slow down the process to establish clearer criteria. At that work session, Teich had vented about being labeled “tone deaf” by the Statesman during the Robert E. Lee Elementary renaming.