[Poppy Harlow, Cnn Anchor, Newsroom:] The Dixie School District voting Tuesday night against changing its name for now. This, as some residents in San Rafael, California are calling for 155-year-old district to drop the word Dixie.
[Sciutto:] Why? Some people there criticizing the name saying that it has that it ties back to the Confederacy, and therefore, is a pro-slavery symbol. CNN national correspondent, Sara Sidner, has more.
[Sara Sidner, Cnn National Correspondent:] The fight over whether to change the name of the Dixie School District is sparking vitriolic political discourse mirroring that which is playing out in southern states over whether to remove Confederate statues.
[Unidentified Woman:] Whatever opportunity there was for the dialogue that you talked about at the beginning is long gone. Media circuses hijacked board meetings, and online smear campaigns, and personal threats have intimidated people, have turned neighbor after neighbor against neighbor.
[Unidentified Man:] The name Dixie never meant a thing to me despite growing up south of the Mason-Dixon line.
[Sidner:] But, this is Marin County, California. A bay area county known for being a laid-back liberal bastion of well-to-do, mostly white residents, which is why the pitched emotion filled battling for the name Dixie took some residents by surprise.
[Marnie Glickman, Dixie School Board Trustee:] I was attacked as a bomb thrower, an arsonist, and outside agitator. People hissed at me, and there was immediate negative impact.
[Sidner:] Dixie School Board Trustee, Marnie Glickman, spearheaded the latest call for the removal of the name Dixie.
[Glickman:] People have been saying that this name hurts them. For decades now, and we can make this simple change.
[Sidner:] Mercy Chiu, a mom with two kids in the district, says those who want a name change have been name-calling bullies to people like her who want to keep the name.
[Mercy Chiu, Wearedixie.org Member:] I personally have been through a lot on just joining this campaign, and to be called racist, and a white supremacist, it's been very hard to understand why people wouldn't just accept that other people have different understanding of a certain word.
[Sidner:] Marin County resident, Noah Griffin, says for people of color the district needs to realize the name conjures up pain.
[Noah Griffin, Changethename.net Co-founder:] Here my grandfather was a slave. He was born in 1852. You can't tell any black person that Dixie means anything other than Confederacy, enslavement, terror, and death. It needs to change.
[Sidner:] But there is a wrinkle in the debate. The issue is over history. Two versions of it. One held by those who want the name changed. And the other, by those who don't. Kerry Pierson says he's been demanding a name change for more than 20 years, and Dixie refers to the Confederacy. He references the timeframe when the first Dixie schoolhouse here was built. You were around the first time that this change was asked for.
[Kerry Pierson, Marin County Resident:] Yes. I'll be the first one to ask for it. Yes, publicly. The question you have to ask yourself is, what did Dixie mean in 1863 during the Civil War?
[Sidner:] But residents with the group, We Are Dixie, who don't want a name change say the school district was named after Mary Dixie, a member of the Miwok Tribe. A member of that same tribe has now joined the fight to keep the name intact. How do you respond to their thought that this is painful.
[Marge Grow-eppard, Miwok Tribe Member:] I did not realize my name offended people. I went to school with the guard the last name Custer. I would never, ever ask him, hey that offends me, and what happened to my people, you need to change your name. That's part of our history. We need to learn from it.
[Sidner:] So, after about three hours of a board meeting, and public comment on this particular subject, the board had 13 names before that it could have changed. They decided to stick with the name Dixie for now. But, after all of that, someone put through a petition that basically asked for the school to change its name to a 14th recommended name, which is the Sojourner Truth School District. Of course, Sojourner Truth being the abolitionist and the African-American, who also was a women's rights advocate. That will be voted on in the coming days Jim, Poppy.
[Sciutto:] Sara Sidner, thank you. Debates like this happening across the country. Now, in another story, the crisis in Venezuela from a very different angle. CNN going inside a pediatric hospital were access to key supplies and even food is dwindling.