NAMES TO GO
Norfolk schools to be renamed, but timing of decision is unclear
Maury High and other Norfolk schools named after Confederates will be renamed. When is unclear.
NORFOLK — Norfolk School Board members agreed Tuesday that the city’s three schools named for Confederates should be changed.
When that could happen is another question.
The board spent the afternoon hearing from local historians about how Maury High School, Ruffner Academy and Taylor Elementary got their names, as well as the connections that five other schools’ names have to either the Confederacy or slavery.
There was consensus that the names of the three with the most obvious ties to the Confederacy need to go. Most board members also want to make it so schools can’t be named after any individuals in the future. Others said that would prevent honoring people whose accomplishments have historically been unrecognized, including women and people of color.
But when Maury, Ruffner and Taylor could get new names is TBD — the board only instructed Superintendent Sharon Byrdsong to report back on what that would entail.
“We do need to change the names of the schools. That’s a yes from me,” board member Tanya Bhasin said. “But when to do it is a question. I think right now, our focus should be on our response to the pandemic. That is a huge, huge mountain in front of us right now.”
Chairwoman Adale Martin said she wanted more information on what it would cost to rename schools before the board surveys the community or forms committees to evaluate potential new names. Martin said she didn’t want a drawn out process that didn’t result in anything like the board’s punt on changing school start times. In that case, the board agreed to changes only to walk back that decision two years later after outcry from parents and concerns about the district’s lack of preparedness to implement such a change.
“I want to start with the end in mind,” Martin said.
Byrdsong asked to wait until the school year starts before coming back with a fuller picture of what changing the names would entail so that her staff’s focus could be on preparations for returning to school during the coronavirus pandemic. Martin also directed the board’s policy committee to recommend a rule saying future schools won’t be named for individuals.
“When you start to name it after individuals, sometimes it can get a little personal,” said board member Noelle Gabriel.
Schools now can be named for people who’ve been dead for at least 10 years. After then-chairwoman Gabriel announced last month that the board would consider renaming schools, a Maury graduate started a petition to rename the high school after Louis Cousins, one of the Norfolk 17 who desegregated all-white schools and was the first Black student at Maury. Cousins died earlier this year at age 76, so would not be eligible for consideration either under the current policy or the proposed new one supported by the majority.
Norfolk has more schools named for Confederates than any other locality in the state. The violent Unite the Right demonstrations in Charlottesville in 2017 prompted calls to rename such schools statewide, but the issue wasn’t considered in Norfolk until this year after weeks of demonstrations against police brutality and racial injustice. The same month, the 80-foot Confederate monument in downtown Norfolk was ordered removed by the mayor.
In recent weeks, Maury’s name has been removed from a building at James Madison University and a lake in Newport News. A Richmond monument dedicated to the “Pathfinder of the Seas” came down to cheers this month, and there are calls to rename the building bearing his name at the U.S. Naval Academy, which he helped found.
Norfolk has more schools named for individuals — 18 in all — than any other Hampton Roads city. That’s partly because Norfolk has more old schools than some cities, but also because in 1912, the district changed the names of schools with geographic monikers to honor individuals instead, retired Norfolk historian Peggy McPhillips told the board. The legally segregated schools were named for famous Virginians: white schools after white people and Black schools after Black people.
Today the three schools named for Confederates have large numbers of Black students: more than half of Maury’s student body, 95% of Ruffner’s and 30% of Taylor’s.
Maury was originally called Norfolk High School until its current building was erected in 1910. Just before the school opened its doors, a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy suggested changing the name to honor Maury instead, said Troy Valos, a special collections librarian with the Sargeant Memorial Collection.
Some on the school board at the time wanted to keep the name, but Maury won out, Valos said.
At the same time Norfolk was changing the names of its schools in the 1910s, it was also changing ordinances to impose housing segregation on previously integrated neighborhoods, Valos and McPhillips said. School Board member Carlos Clanton said he thought that connection was important for people to realize. Vice Chairman Rodney Jordan said it’s something that’s been lost as people “mythologize” the idea that white and Black people live apart from one another by choice as opposed to as a consequence of racist, segregationist policies.
Of the three Confederates with schools here named for them, only Norfolk native Walter Herron Taylor has direct ties to the city. He worked as an aide-de-camp to Robert E. Lee during the war and became a banker in the city after.
A slave owner who advocated for gradual emancipation, William Henry Ruffner founded the state’s separate education system for white and Black students and was Virginia’s first schools superintendent.
Maury, the most well-known of the three, was a scientist who studied the ocean’s currents and established sea lanes still used today. He spent most of the Civil War in Europe and oversaw the construction of Confederate ships, McPhillips said. After the war, he went to Mexico and pushed for former Confederates to immigrate and establish a “New Virginia.”
In addition to Maury, Ruffner and Taylor, five other Norfolk schools have more distant ties to either the Confederacy or slave holders. James Monroe Elementary and James Madison Alternative School are named for presidents who owned slaves, while Blair Middle School is named for James Blair, who founded William & Mary, which used enslaved labor.
The Southside STEM Academy at Campostella and Willoughby Elementary School are named for neighborhoods: Campostella for Camp Stella, the name of a local Confederate force, and Willoughby for a family that owned land and enslaved Black people through the 1700s.
Board members expressed less certainty about what to do with names like that, agreeing only to start with Maury, Ruffner and Taylor.