News that the May 24 Bermuda Day Holiday is to be renamed National Heroes Day with the late Dame Lois Browne-Evans as the first hero to be honoured has been greeted with less than unanimous approval. The objections focus on two things.

The first is the change of the holiday from Bermuda Day to a day that specifically honours individuals. To be sure, "May 24th" has gone through any number of changes in the years since it first honoured the birthday of Queen Victoria.

But the reasoning behind making it Bermuda Day was, in the wake of the 1977 Riots and the Pitt Report, to establish a day in which the whole community could come together to celebrate everything which is good about the Island.

Over the years, the day, and the Heritage Month events that surround it, has become well established, and while it can be argued with ease that the white community has still not fully embraced it, enormous progress has been made. Now a celebration of the community is being replaced with a day to celebrate individuals. That's a different matter entirely, and one wonders why, of all the public holidays in the calendar, this is the one that should be replaced.

One would assume that Labour Day is untouchable for the Progressive Labour Party, but one wonders why one segment of the community, albeit a very large one, gets a day of its own when the whole community does not. Equally, with the exception of a few diehard Royalists, it would be a fair bet that few tears would be shed if the Queen's Birthday Holiday was replaced, or combined with, the honouring of a national hero.

Apparently the United Bermuda Party proposed that an entirely new day be set aside for National Heroes Day, and that's probably a better solution, despite the loss of productivity that it would inevitably entail. Even if May 24 is deemed to be the best day for this holiday, there is the question of who selects the hero of the year, and who should get pride of place as the first "hero" selected.

Certainly Dame Lois deserves recognition, but, in spite of all her accomplishments, one wonders if she should have been the first person chosen.

Dr. Eva Hodgson has already made a good case on this page for the late Roosevelt Brown being honoured for leading the change to universal adult suffrage. An equally good argument could be made for Dr. E.F. Gordon, the father of the Bermuda labour movement and a fervent fighter for equal rights for all Bermudians.

W.L. Tucker and Dr. Eustace Cann, who spent decades arguing in Parliament for adult suffrage, for men, and in Dr. Cann's case, for women, can stake equally strong claims. It's also hard to avoid the suspicion that the method of selection – behind closed doors in the Cabinet Office – means that all heroes will come from one side of the political divide. That leaves out seminal figures in Bermuda's history like Sir Henry Tucker, the first Government Leader elected under universal suffrage, and Sir Edward Richards, Bermuda's first black Premier.

And then, there's a need to go further back in history, or at least past the second half of the last century and the first decade of this one.

What about Mary Prince, a Bermuda-born and raised slave whose published narrative helped to bring about Emancipation, not only in Bermuda, but throughout the British Empire?

Two others include: Edward Frazer, the black Methodist slave who undertook the work of building the Cobbs Hill Chapel in Warwick in 1825. The church was built at night and on holidays and took two years to complete. Later freed, Frazer pleaded the cause of black people in Britain; and James Athil, a prominent black shipbuilder who petitioned Parliament on behalf of free black people after Emancipation. As a result black and white became equal in law, a monumentally important step.

A minimum of research and a memory that goes back further than six months throws up all kinds of "national heroes". Bermuda has a plethora of historians who could produce a shortlist within days. But last week's announcement appears to have been taken without thought, let alone research. Short term political expediency, aimed at exploiting the memory of Dame Lois seems to be all. And all that does is cheapen her legacy.