The ugly pasts of famous men whose names grace SF landmarks Should these places be renamed?

Click through to see some of the controversial pasts of men who have their names on San Francisco landmarks, streets, and more. Click through to see some of the controversial pasts of men who have their names on San Francisco landmarks, streets, and more. Image 1 of / 50 Caption Close The ugly pasts of famous men whose names grace SF landmarks 1 / 50 Back to Gallery

While an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose white supremacists, they are less certain about how they feel about the Confederate statues those supremacists supposedly were defending, according to a report by the data-analysis site FiveThirtyEight.

Should they be toppled? Allowed to remain where they are? Relegated to battlefields and museums only?

An NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist University poll taken after the violence in Charlottesville, Va., found 62 percent of respondents favored leaving statues honoring leaders of the Confederacy stand as testaments to history.

In San Francisco, there are statues and street names that honor those who enslaved or helped eradicate indigenous peoples, or both. A recreational area is named after a "hero" of the Philippine-American War who bragged about hanging 35 Filipinos without trial. A prominent street plaza bears the name of a man behind the forced displacement of African-Americans and Japanese-Americans from the city's Western Addition in the 1960s.

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The above slideshow examines some of the men deemed worthy of public approbation in the Bay Area, but whose resumes are tainted with shameful episodes. Should their names be preserved on signposts, schools and parks?

Perhaps it comes down to whether the good deeds outweigh the bad.

For example, Franciscan friar Junipero Serra, "the evangelizer of the West," is so highly regarded by the Vatican for his missionary work in colonial California that Pope Francis made him a saint. But Native Americans view him as anything but saintly.

"Everywhere they put a mission the majority of Indians are gone," Ron Andrade, executive director of the Los Angeles City/County Native American Indian Commission, told the Guardian in 2015. "And Serra knew what they were doing: they were taking the land, taking the crops, he knew the soldiers were raping women, and he turned his head."

Mike Moffitt is an SFGATE digital reporter. Contact: mike.moffitt@sfgate.com