Goodbye, J.E.B Stuart High School

[struggle4progress]

Posted: Monday, March 28, 2016 12:00 am
BY DAVID KERR

... The school was named in 1957. While some say it was named as a part of the upcoming Civil War centennial celebration, that probably wasn’t the case. It’s more likely that it and another school in Fairfax, Robert E. Lee High, were named after Confederate war heroes in a not too subtle protest of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Topeka decision ordering public schools to be integrated. Virginia was a leader in the “Massive Resistance” movement that vehemently opposed school desegregation.

When I was in high school, I don’t remember thinking anything of the name of the school. It was my local high school. But I have since wondered what some of my African–American classmates might have thought. They had begun school in a segregated system. Maybe they weren’t too fond of the school’s name, either, but just didn’t say so. Or maybe they didn’t think much about the name. But it seems a bit insulting that when school segregation ended, they spent their high school years in an institution named after a general who fought for a cause that advocated keeping their ancestors in slavery ...

While I support the name change, when people ask me where I went to high school, I am likely to still say J.E.B. Stuart. It was Stuart during my years there, my diploma says it and so does my letter jacket.

But it will be just fine if graduates in later years, with new school colors and logos, say they went to Thurgood Marshall High. That’s a name I would be proud of.

http://www.fredericksburg.com/opinion/commentary/column-goodbye-j-e-b-stuart-high-school/article_4408aea1-5341-56f4-8356-5c179571db40.html

[Igel]

1. I went to General John Stricker JHS.

To this day, I have no idea who Stricker was. Nobody did at the time. It was a name.

Similarly, I grew up in an area that had a bunch of War of 1812 themed street names--Ross and Wells, for example were involved in the 1812 war local to the area (Ross was, oddly, a British general). Since we studied the War of 1812 and local "stuff" I think most people, to the extent they thought about the street names, assumed they were all related to that war.

Only much later (as in last fall or in January '16) did I stop to wonder about them. Turns out one was named after a minor uprising that had something to do with desegregation in the '20s or '30s or somehow otherwise connected to race relations at the time. Details are fuzzy at this point. One was named after the governor at the time, who was also involved in the wrangle. If you didn't put the two together and understand that they were named at the same time, you'd just think that one was named after a town in the state and the other after a governor.

I guess somebody could be upset at the overt racism, if they had a clue. But since they don't have a clue, they're not offended. I have trouble thinking of it all as completely irrelevant. It's like the Minoan Linear A inscriptions. They may say something offensive, but it really doesn't matter. Or the street names. Or who Stricker was.