Name change throws a curve to high school
Removing Confederate moniker creates new rift
FALLS CHURCH, Va. – J.E.B. Stuart High School’s baseball team gathers in the gloaming. “One, two, three – Raiders!” the players shout as they trot out to their positions.
These are among the last athletes who will wear Stuart’s name and call themselves Raiders.
One, two, three — gone.
“It’s kind of cool that we’re the last ones,” junior shortstop Archer Rutledge tells USA TODAY. “We’re making history.”
History is the rub. The school is named for a Confederate general. Such names are coming off schools in the same way Confederate statues are coming off pedestals. At least three dozen Confederate-themed schools nationally have changed their names since 2015, according to Education Week.
Stuart will morph into Justice High School on July 1, when the sports
“The wave of Confederate names on schools after Brown v. Board of Education is a stain on the state. Bad decisions have a cost. This is the price we have to pay for that decision in the 1950s.”
Hile Rutledge Father of student athlete
teams known as Raiders will be called Wolves. The Fairfax County school board voted to change the school’s name last year, and students voted on the school’s new nickname in January.
Community controversy over whether to scrap the Stuart name seethed for several years. Each side claimed to have history on its side. “Changers” said a school with a majority of minority students shouldn’t honor a man who fought for preserving slavery. “Keepers” said to take the name away is to pretend that history didn’t happen.
Archer is a Changer who says many of his teammates are Keepers.
“It hasn’t affected my relationship with my teammates,” he says. “We think different ways, but we’re all one team.”
Jack Primrose, a junior outfielder and pitcher, says he’s proud to play for the Stuart name and will be sad to see it go.
“To me, the name change seems like a waste,” he says. “I just feel like if it’s here, it might as well stay.”
When Keepers say they want to preserve history, they mean not only of J.E.B. Stuart, the man, but also of J.E.B. Stuart, the school. They say it is foolish to change a name that has been loved by generations of alumni and parents.
“The Stuart name has been part of this community for a long time,” says Steve Primrose, Jack’s father. “I’ve lived in the neighborhood for 18 years, and it’s part of our identity. A small minority are dictating the path these kids have to deal with.”
Maria Guerra is a 1982 Stuart grad whose son Nick is a freshman infielder and pitcher. “I love the name,” she says. “Why change history?”
Changers say the history of J.E.B. Stuart High School — named in 1958 and opened in 1959 — is precisely the point.
Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark Supreme Court decision that declared segregation in public schools unconstitutional, was decided in 1954. U.S. Sen. Harry F. Byrd Sr. of Virginia called for “massive resistance,” and schools in his state mostly did not begin to integrate until the 1960s.
“I don’t think people who were naming schools for Confederate people of note (in that era) didn’t know what they were doing,” says Heidi Beirich, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project. “In the school context, it is even more powerful: ‘We don’t want desegregation, and we’re going to remind you who is important in our history.’ ”
Julia Clark, a sprinter on Stuart’s track team, says the mural of J.E.B. Stuart in the school’s weight room shows him as a sort of superhero on horseback.
“He’s painted with these bulging muscles … in a way that is so heroic, almost immortalizing him, and it made me uncomfortable because this is a man who fought for white supremacy and fought to keep people like me and my family enslaved,” she says. “So I didn’t believe that was right, and it pushed me to fully invest myself (in the change movement). And I gave my testimony at the school board, and that really seemed to touch people’s hearts.”
Julia is one of Stuart’s 2,125 students. Roughly 55% are Hispanic, 21% white, 12% Asian and 9% black. About two-thirds qualify for free or reduced meals. They come from more than 70 countries.
“I have friends from all around the world,” says Jose Machado, senior goalkeeper on the boys’ soccer team. “We all just want the American dream.”
“Changers” said a school with a majority of minority students shouldn’t honor a man who fought for preserving slavery. “Keepers” said to take the name away is to pretend that history didn’t happen.
Machado has another dream: He’d like his team to advance far enough in the postseason to be Stuart’s last spring team standing — and thus the Last Raiders.
Roughly 140 buildings in K-12 school districts in 15 states honor Confederate leaders, representing one-tenth of 1% of the roughly 98,000 public schools in the USA, according to an Education Week Research Center analysis of federal education data from the 2015-16 school year. Two-thirds of such schools are in five states — Texas, Virginia, Florida, Georgia and Louisiana. Most were built after 1950, the analysis says, meaning their context is more civil rights than Civil War.
Justice High School celebrates Thurgood Marshall, Louis Gonzaga Mendez Jr., Barbara Rose Johns and others who fought for justice and equality. Marshall, the late Supreme Court justice, was chief attorney for the plaintiffs in Brown v. Board. Mendez was a World War II hero. And Johns was a civil rights activist.
“The wave of Confederate names on schools after Brown v. Board of Education is a stain on the state,” says Hile Rutledge, father of Archer, the shortstop.
Archer will be in the first graduating class under the Justice name.
“I feel good about that,” he says. “And I’m excited to see what our new baseball uniforms will look like.”