In 2020, an elected panel in San Anselmo, a 12,000-person town in Marin County, voted to remove Sir Francis Drake’s name on a high school because of his involvement in the slave trade. The following year, in May, the school board replaced the famed English explorer’s name with that of Archie Williams, a Black runner who won Olympic gold in Berlin alongside Jesse Owens, served with the Tuskegee Airmen, and taught at the school for more than 20 years. A letter from the superintendent informed parents that the board was trying to make the school “more anti-racist,” and that the current name did not “align with this goal and our values.” Nearby, local officials also took down a 30-year-old statue depicting Drake at the Larkspur Ferry Terminal. Quite a comeuppance for a man who claimed that Indigenous inhabitants along the Pacific coast believed he was a god when he first came ashore, in 1579, after which (again, in his view) they handed over their land to England.
Just five years earlier, in 2016, the National Park Service erected a plaque dedicated to Drake at Limantour Beach, about 26 miles west of San Anselmo. It recognized the area as the Drakes Bay National Historic and Archaeological District, marking the spot where he perhaps first landed on the West Coast (though no one knows for