Almost 30,000 people have signed an online petition sponsored by the Oscar-winning actor Julianne Moore, which calls for a Virginia high school named after a Confederate US civil war general to be renamed.
Moore came together with Hollywood producer Bruce Cohen after students and alumni at the racially diverse JEB Stuart school in Fairfax County, Virginia, began a campaign to change its name. The movement began in response to the shootings of nine black parishioners in Charleston, South Carolina, in June, by a white supremacist who proudly flew and wore the Confederate flag, and subsequent calls for institutions across the south to rid themselves of Confederate iconography.
“We name our buildings, monuments and parks after exalted and heroic individuals as a way to honour them, and inspire ourselves to do better and reach for more in our own lives,” Moore said in a statement to the Washington Post. “It is reprehensible to me that in this day and age a school should carry and celebrate the name of a person who fought for the enslavement of other human beings. I think the students of this school deserve better than that moniker.”
Today the school, which Moore and Cohen attended in the 1970s, is 49% Hispanic, 14% Asian, 11% black and 24% white. Cohen, who won an Oscar for best film for 1999’s American Beauty and produced 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook and 2008’s Milk, told the Washington Post that a giant Confederate flag was painted at the centre of the school basketball court during his time there.
“It’s something that, embarrassingly, none of us stopped to think: How did our school get this name?” he said. “It was more like this embarrassing shrug. The reason why it was never changed is because students never said it was wrong. Now that’s changed … finally, there’s real momentum.”
Stuart was a hero of the Confederacy, considered one of General Robert E Lee’s most important aides and known for his cavalier image. He died at the Battle of Yellow Tavern in 1864, at the age of 31.
JEB Stuart high school was named in 1959, only five years after the US supreme court ordered an end to segregation in public schools. Now Moore and Cohen have asked for it to be renamed Thurgood Marshall high school, after the first African American US supreme court justice, who lived locally.
“No one should have to apologise for the name of the public high school you attended and the history of racism it represents, as we and so many alumni of Stuart have felt the need to do our whole lives,” reads the petition.
