Portsmouth, change the name of Wilson High
BLM is inspiring Americans to re-evaluate issues such as Confederate monuments and institutions named in honor of racists
Many years ago, when Virginia was struggling to integrate its public schools, I was sent to Portsmouth’s Woodrow Wilson High, which I viewed as the “white” school across town.
I eventually warmed to the school named after our 28th president. My conversion had less to do with Wilson’s history than its strong tradition as a football powerhouse.
I attended Wilson for three years. Then, in 1972, my senior year, I was transferred to the newly built Manor High School. Rather than being named in honor of a person, Manor was named — in the spirit of diversity — for the two ethnic neighborhoods it served: The mostly
Black Cavalier Manor, where I grew up, and the predominantly white community known as Hodges Manor.
It was only years later that I came to fully appreciate the aspirational thinking that went into the naming of Manor. That appreciation evolved after I learned much more about Woodrow Wilson, the man. When I’d attended Wilson High, I didn’t know that as president of Princeton University, he blocked African Americans from enrolling in the college. Nor did I know that in his first 10 months after being elected president of the United States, Wilson fired 15 of 17 Black government supervisors and replaced them with whites, claiming that Black men should not lead white women in
America.
After learning those and other similar facts, I felt I’d been misled — actually mis-educated — based on what I was not taught about Wilson in high school. That frustration was compounded in 1993, when the Portsmouth School Board decided to close the aging Wilson High on Willet Drive. In an effort to preserve the Wilson legacy, the board did something really bizarre: It squashed the name of Manor High School and renamed it Woodrow Wilson High.
With the Black Lives Matter movement’s powerful campaign for social change, I am hoping the board will revisit that blunder. Nationwide, the movement is inspiring Americans to re-evaluate issues such as Confederate monuments and institutions named in honor of prominent Americans who were avowed racists.
In the spirit of that movement, I have joined a diverse local group of alumni circulating a
Change.org petition urging the school board to drop the name of Woodrow Wilson High. The petition, which has garnered more than 1,200 signatures, also asks the board to restore the Manor High School name. Alumni and Portsmouth residents plan to present the petition to the school board in its Aug. 13 meeting.
To be clear: This is not, as President Donald Trump and others insist, about erasing white people’s history. This is about correcting America’s centuriesold habit of sanitizing history so completely that it is grossly misleading.
It’s also about simple respect and dignity. Just as no Jewish person would want to go to a school named in honor of a Nazi commander, no African American should have to attend a school named in tribute to a man such as Wilson, who detested Blacks and worked against our advancement.
Nor should we think of this narrowly as a Black or a white issue. As we seek to dismantle white supremacy in America, it is critical that we educate everyone about the human fallacies, as well as the strengths and contributions, of America’s leaders throughout history.
Officials at Princeton University have already demonstrated that they grasp the importance of reckoning with Woodrow Wilson’s total record regarding race. After re-evaluating that record, they recently removed his name from Princeton’s public policy school and one of its residence halls.
I hope the Portsmouth School Board will likewise demonstrate an awakening in this new day in America. The board should vote to scrub Wilson’s name off the building and restore the Manor High School name to its rightful place.
Nathan McCall is a former reporter and author of “Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America.” A Portsmouth native, he lives in Atlanta.