published on August 22, 2024 in Informative Details

As renaming of J.E.B. Stuart High nears, divisions remain

As the campaign intensified to strip J.E.B. Stuart High School of its name, Lisa McQuail’s friendships began to fracture.

McQuail, an advocate for erasing the name of the Confederate general from the Northern Virginia school, was barred from an alumni group on Facebook, she said. So they communicated on the page “End Confederate & Segregationist Names for Public Schools.”

“I’ve lost many friends,” McQuail said. “It’s going to take years to rebuild the alumni community.”

The two-year debate in Fairfax County over the renaming is poised to end this week, with the school board expected to settle on a new name.

But that is unlikely to silence the controversy. The debate in Falls Church has found echoes across the South as communities clash over which figures deserve to be honored in public spaces and the appropriate destination for Confederate imagery.

Backers of the change insist it is inappropriate to honor a Confederate cavalry commander who fought to preserve slavery. The “keepers” — people who want Stuart’s name to remain on one of the district’s most racially diverse high schools — argue that renaming the school amounts to obliterating history.

The Fairfax County School Board voted three months ago to drop the name, but that hardly ended the controversy. Picking a new name has been no less fraught.

In a nonbinding ballot in September, more voters supported calling the school “Stuart” than any other option, which renaming proponents attacked as a false compromise and no change at all.

Divisions form

After a white supremacist walked into a South Carolina church and murdered nine black parishioners on a June evening in 2015, Stuart students, parents and alumni in Fairfax began agitating for a name change. They were boosted by the Hollywood star power of actress Julianne Moore and producer Bruce Cohen, both J.E.B. Stuart graduates.

The pair started an online petition that generated close to 40,000 signatures.

But that was only the start. A committee was formed, but members couldn’t agree on a path forward.

One of the committee members, Debbie Ratliff, doesn’t blame the district’s handling of the process for the charged community debate that ensued.

“The level of toxicity would have been the same,” she said. “We all feel very passionate about this.”

The school board finally voted in July, deciding 7 to 2, to rename the school. As part of that vote, the board agreed to consider — “in a spirit of compromise” — stripping the initials “J.E.B.” and calling the school “Stuart High.”

The contenders

On a Saturday in August, hundreds of community members filled the Stuart auditorium to hear and offer suggestions for a new name. Fliers advocating for Barbara Rose Johns, who as an African American teenager fought for school integration, were distributed by community members outside the auditorium.

Kenneth Longmyer, whose daughter is a Stuart student, was among those who advocated for Rose Johns — appropriate, he said, because Rose Johns was a woman of color.

“We thought it was high time to recognize groups that had been ignored or overlooked when schools were being named,” he said.

Speakers lined the aisles of the auditorium for hours to voice support for one name or another. A document was projected on a large screen, tracking every written suggestion. Some, such as "Schooly McSchoolface" and "Triggered Snowflake," appeared to mock the process.

A week later, the community vote — which was limited to one vote per household in the school attendance area — was held and a list of more than 70 suggestions was whittled to five. Superintendent Scott Brabrand forwarded those selections to the board.

They were, in order of popularity: Stuart; variations of Thurgood Marshall, the first black Supreme Court justice; Rose Johns; Peace Valley, the street on which the high school sits; and Louis Gonzaga Mendez Jr., a decorated World War II Army colonel and longtime Fairfax resident.

Name-change proponents are quick to argue that the sum of votes favoring something other than “Stuart” outnumbered those who wanted to keep a variation on the old name.

“Everyone who doesn’t want the name change voted for Stuart,” said Cohen, the Hollywood producer. “It’s absurd, because the vote was to change the name, and Stuart is not a name change.”

Supporters of a new moniker, including Cohen, have generally rallied around Marshall, Rose Johns and Mendez. They view the renaming as an opportunity to have the Falls Church school better reflect its diversity.

The school is 54 percent Hispanic, 22 percent white, 13 percent Asian, 9 percent black and 2 percent multiracial, according to Virginia Department of Education data.

The number of Hispanic students is one reason Tina Mendez Morgan and her brother, Louis G. Mendez III, believe that their father’s name is the most fitting. Mendez, who died in 2001, was of Mexican American, Native American and Spanish descent, they said.

“The Hispanic community and the student body needs a Hispanic role model,” Mendez Morgan said. “I just think that’s the right thing to do.”

The Mendez family hadn’t paid much attention to the renaming imbroglio. They were pulled into the clamor after one of Mendez’s adult children learned that his name had been nominated. Since then, Mendez Morgan and her brother have campaigned for their father.

Col. Mendez graduated from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., in 1940. He was a battalion commander in the Army's 82nd Airborne "All American" Division during World War II.

After a decorated military career, he worked as an educator and for what became the Education Department. Several of his 12 children attended Stuart.

“Not only did he have this stellar career in the Army, but ... he was involved in education,” Mendez Morgan said.

Criticism of the process

Opponents of the renaming say they, too, have been wounded by invective from their neighbors. One former Stuart student encountered such a “hostile environment” inside the high school after opposing the renaming that his father transferred him to another school, according to a lawsuit filed by Fairfax residents against the school district over its renaming policy.

Those residents argued that the regulation was “vague and ambiguous,” resulting in “arbitrary and capricious” actions by the school board, according to court papers.

“The regulation is unconstitutionally vague and raises equal-protection issues,” said attorney H. Jay Spiegel, who is representing the residents.

Denise Patton, a resident who hopes the lawsuit is successful, said those who have taken issue with the renaming are concerned about finances. It would cost about $512,570 to replace school gear if the school were called “Stuart” and about $800,620 for a complete name change.

“The big concern for the name change has nothing to do with the Confederacy,” she said. “It’s money.”

The school board’s renaming vote will proceed despite the lawsuit, according to a district spokesperson.

The new name must be in place by 2019. The board can heed the community’s preferences — or not.

At least two board members said during a work session earlier this month that they favored naming the school after Marshall. Others said that would conflict with the existing George C. Marshall High School in Falls Church. One board member said she would support “Stuart”; others said, unequivocally, they would not.

School board member Elizabeth Schultz, who represents the Springfield District, expressed concerns about the process.

“What was the point of a community vote if we weren’t going to listen to the vote?” she asked. “If the board’s going to do what it’s going to do, I feel like maybe what we’re going through is almost like a game of charades.”

The divisions sown by the debate won’t heal any time soon, warned board member Tamara Derenak Kaufax, who represents the Lee District.

“I began every one of these conversations with our board saying that we need to be working on policy changes that build bridges and not ones that create greater chasms,” she said.

“I don’t know if that’s going to be possible in this process at all.”

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