Va. school drops Confederate general’s name in favor of Obama’s
When students at J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School in Richmond, Va., return from summer break, they will no longer study at a school named after a Confederate general.
Instead, members of the 400-strong student body, about 90 percent of whom are black, will be attending Barack Obama Elementary School.
On Monday night, the Richmond School Board voted to remove Gen. Stuart’s name from the school, replacing it with the name of the country’s first African-American president. The vote, 6-1, came after months of public meetings and input, including from students themselves.
“This is the former capital of the Confederacy, and J.E.B. Stuart is an individual who fought to preserve slavery,” said Jason Kamras, the Richmond schools superintendent. “And I couldn’t think of a more fitting change in the arc of history to have a school named after our first African-American president.”
The vote reflects the national conversation and action that schools, communities and cities have taken in recent years to redress the country’s Confederate and slave-owning history, particularly after a deadly white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., last August brought renewed attention to Confederate monuments around the country.
Monuments to Confederate figures have been removed from streets and public places. Protests have been held over the rights of citizens to display Confederate flags. In recent years, more than a dozen universities — including Brown, Harvard, Georgetown and the University of Virginia — have acknowledged their historical ties to slavery.
Other cities in Virginia have taken a look at their school systems. In February, Petersburg voted to rename three schools dedicated to Confederate figures by July 1, 2018, The RichmondTimes-Dispatch reported.
Last year, the Fairfax School Board voted to remove Gen. Stuart’s name from a high school in Falls Church, Va., and replace it with Justice.
The name change in Richmond was not the first time that a school has been stripped of its Confederate nomenclature and replaced with that of the former president. In Jackson, Mississippi, last year, Davis International Baccalaureate Elementary School, which was named after Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America, was also renamed after former President Obama.
But in Richmond, removing the name of Gen. James Ewell Brown Stuart and replacing it with Mr. Obama’s has resonance.
A city of 223,000 people, Richmond was the former capital of the Confederacy, and its streets reflect the history of the period. A city commission is expected this year to present recommendations about what to do with monuments to such figures as Mr. Davis or Gen. Robert E. Lee, Mayor Levar Stoney said Tuesday.
He said the school was the only one in the city named after a Confederate figure, and that the move to rename it reflected the progressiveness and diversity of the city, which is 48 percent black.
“Richmond has always been front and center in the growth of the South,” he said.
Mr. Stoney said the vote corrected a “serious contradiction” in having students, mostly of color, attend a school named after a figure who fought to preserve slavery.
Kenya Gibson, who voted against the renaming, said she wanted more time to discuss the possibility of naming the school after a local civil rights leader. She supported the result.
“I am really thankful that we finally rejected the celebratory symbols of our racist history,” she said. “In Richmond, we have had lots of discussions about our monuments, and the school name is certainly a part of our legacy. It is time to move on from that.”