West New York officials are removing the name of disgraced U.S. Senator Bob Menendez from a local school following his conviction on federal bribery charges.
“We’re going to take the name down before the school year starts,” Mayor Albio Sires told the New Jersey Globe.
The Robert Menendez Elementary School will revert back to its original name: PS #3.
The school was named to honor Menendez in 2013 by then-Mayor Felix Roque to make peace with Menendez; Roque endorsed Republican Joe Kyrillos against Menendez in 2012.
After Menendez was appointed to the U.S. Senate in 2006, Sires, then the mayor of West New York and the Assembly Speaker, succeeded him in Congress. He did not seek re-election to the House in 2022 and easily won a race for mayor last year.
There is some precedent for removing the names of fallen officeholders from public buildings.
The Harrison A. Wiliams, Jr. Metropark train station in Iselin was named in honor of the three-term U.S. Senator’s commitment to transportation issues by Gov. Brendan Byrne in 1979. But after Williams was convicted on federal bribery charges in the Abscam scandal in 1981 and later went to prison, there was a push to remove his name; still, it took New Jersey Transit several years to take his name down.
History hit the reset button on Woodrow Wilson in 2020.
Ninety-six years after his death, the 13th president of Princeton University, 34th Governor of New Jersey, and 28th President of the United States faced a reckoning with what New Jersey’s 56th Governor, Phil Murphy, called an “uneven history as it relates to race.”
Wilson’s handling of race issues—U.S. Postal Service offices, the U.S. Navy, and the U.S. Treasury were segregated shortly after he took federal office in 1913—spurred Princeton University to drop the name of the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Wilson College; Monmouth University dropped Wilson’s name from one of its buildings.
Murphy acknowledged the irony of fighting systemic racism in the United States from behind Wilson’s desk; in June, he stopped using it.
Among the casualties of New Jersey’s new view of Wilson was his chief of staff, George Helmy. When the governor gave up the Wilson desk, he took the one Helmy used.