I was reviewing my AIC website today, and in rereading my post about John Stanford from 2020, I discovered that the link to John Stanford’s entry at Arlington National Cemetery was broken. (Here was the original link: http://arlingtoncemetery.net/stanford.htm.) I then searched for “John Stanford” on the site and found a brief description on this page: https://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/?s=John+Stanford. However, the Read More… link produced an “Oops. That page can’t be found.”
I hope the original page is “not found” for a technical reason. Maybe the website got updated, and no one updated that link for that page. I wonder, however, if the fact that John Stanford was African American is the real reason the page is not found. Yet, whoever did it (probably in a hurry), did not confirm that a reference could still be found by search.
This was on my mind because Seattle Public Schools is once again facing great challenges, much as it was in 1995, when General John Stanford was hired to lead the district. My work in education 30 years later is still inspired and guided by what I learned from him. I feel that I owe a debt of gratitude for that inspiration, and I’m not ready to see his legacy forgotten just because his page has been deleted from Arlington National Cemetery.