The national movement to change racially offensive names of buildings, sports teams and landmarks will soon touch a group of schools in southeast Portland. Lynch Meadows, Lynch Wood and Lynch View elementary schools will shed their "Lynch" before the upcoming school year in response to growing concern about the word's racial connotations.

The schools, part of the Centennial School District, were named for the Lynch family, which donated land over a century ago to build the first of the schools. But Centennial Superintendent Paul Coakley says many newer families coming into the district associate the name with America's violent racial history.

The upcoming change is a new step in a movement that, in Oregon, has focused primarily on names insensitive to Native Americans. Several geographic landmarks whose names included the term 'squaw', now considered a slur against Native American women, have been renamed in recent years. And in 2015, the Oregon Board of Education backed advocates in a controversial move that pushed 14 Oregon high schools to change their Native American-themed mascots.

Now that movement, most prominent on college campuses, with professional sports teams and among state geography boards, has reached the elementary school level.

"There were an increasing amount of questions and some complaints from families of color around the name," Coakley said.

There is no connection between the Lynch family and the practice associated with the term, he said, but it's still been "a disruption for some students."

Centennial school district, established in 1976 at the very southeast edge of the city of Portland and extending into the west edge of Gresham, educates about 6,000 students, 55 percent of them non-white. The largest racial minority are Latino students, who make up 27 percent of enrollment.

That is a significant change from a decade earlier, when the district was 84 percent white, according to the Centennial school district website.

"Our diversity is increasing every year, with families coming in from Northeast Portland and out of state, so [the names] needed to be looked at," said Coakley, who is African-American and grew up in the area.

Members of the mostly-white Centennial School Board agreed, coming to a consensus that the names should be changed at a board meeting in mid-July. They plan to pass a resolution officially discontinuing the use of "Lynch" on the schools' signs, stationary, web sites and in oral references at their next board meeting on August 9.

Board Vice Chair Pam Shields said part of the reason she's "very comfortable" with changing the school names is that the district no longer owns land donated by the Lynch family. Other district schools have also seen their names change over the course of their history—Centennial Middle School, she noted, used to be called Lynch Terrace.

Discontinuing use of that portion of the schools' names is a minor step to ensure "that everybody feels like they belong to this district, and that we can put this potential negative behind us," she said.

If the resolution passes, the district would aim to change the signage at the three schools before the academic year begins, which Coakley estimated would cost around $2,000. The schools have already been operating unofficially as Meadows, Wood and View, according to Coakley, so the change wouldn't be much of a surprise to school faculty, staff and families, he said.

The recommendation Coakley presented to the board last week called for legally retaining the names of the three schools and using Meadows, Wood and View Elementary School "for all public purposes." But the board discussed the prospect of changing names legally as well.

Board chair Shar Giard said making the legal changes would be expensive, however, and would likely entail a more long-term process. "We have connections with the federal government and [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development] and the state of Oregon and the Department of Education" using the full legal names, she said.

Lynching of black people by white mobs primarily took place in Southern states, but does have a history in Oregon as well, according to Portland State University historian Darrell Millner, whose research has focused on early Oregon black history.

One of the most heinous examples of violence against black people in the state, Millner said, was the lynching of a black man accused of raping a white woman in Coos Bay in 1902. In the 1920s, he added, the Ku Klux Klan drove out the one black resident of Oregon City by threatening to lynch him.

The history of anti-black racism in Oregon has featured in other renaming efforts as well. In 2013, the Oregon Geographic Names Board agreed to rename Negro Brown Canyon in Jefferson County, which was once referred to by the more degrading and charged version of the word negro, to John Brown Canyon. John Brown was a former slave from Georgia and one of the first black homesteaders in Oregon, according to the state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

This week, the University of Oregon hung new signs on a dormitory long named after a former professor with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan. It is now called Unthank Hall, in honor of the school's first black architecture graduate.

But demands to change the name of the university's oldest building—named for one of its founding fathers, Matthew Deady, who supported slavery in the 1850s before changing his stance—proved more controversial. University president Michael Schill recommended keeping the name, fearing a change would "obscure" the school's history.

Pushback has been a consistent feature in renaming attempts both in Oregon and nationally, due to logistical concerns, fears of erasing history and other reasons.

In Portland, after a 1989 city council decision to rename Union Avenue to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, thousands of residents attempted to reverse the change, many citing concerns for business owners on the thoroughfare. And pushback after the Oregon Board of Education ordered schools to eliminate Native American-themed mascots led the decision to be amended a few months later to allow schools to keep their mascots with permission from one of Oregon's federally recognized tribes.

A renaming attempt in 2015 also having to do with the name Lynch threw Lebanon Valley College in Annville, Pennsylvania into the national spotlight. Students demanded the renaming of Lynch Memorial Hall, named after a former college president, because of the historical implications of the word. But their efforts were widely criticized and ultimately unsuccessful.

Despite the controversial nature of many of these efforts, Coakley said he's confident there won't be much pushback to the decision to rename the Lynch schools. If anything, he said, people will be relieved.

Giard agreed. There's "probably going to be a loud roar of agreement."

--Janaki Chadha

503-221-8165; @janakichadha