Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy (19th at Collingwood Street) – Known as “Douglass Elementary School” during Harvey Milk’s time in the Castro, this urban public school was renamed “Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy” in 1996 and took as its core values academic excellence, teaching tolerance and non-violence, celebrating diversity, and building a strong family-school-community connection.

The small, alternative elementary school is located a block from Harvey’s former camera store and residence. The kids have decorated the school’s front wall with a variety of very colorful mosaic murals. The academy teaches its 200 racially diverse students, who come from throughout San Francisco, a philosophy of tolerance and empathy similar to the one that the school’s namesake espoused. Harvey spent much of the last year of his life campaigning throughout California against a measure that would have banned openly gay people from working in the public school system and saw it successfully defeated a few weeks before his assassination.