Hollywood is getting involved with the renaming of a local high school in Fairfax County, Virginia, just outside Washington. Why? It’s because the name of the high school, J.E.B. Stuart, has only now started to offend people, despite opening its doors in 1959. J.E.B. Stuart, of course, was a Confederate Army general from Virginia during the Civil War.
Two alumni of the high school – Academy Award-winning actress Julianne Moore and producer Rob Cohen – have lent their star power to an online petition for renaming the school. This petition was sparked due to the Charleston shootings in June, where nine black parishioners at a historic black church were gunned down by Dylann Roof.
Moore, who recently played Sarah Palin in the Palin-trashing HBO movie Game Change, told the Washington Post:
“We name our buildings, monuments, and parks after exalted and heroic individuals as a way to honor them, and inspire ourselves to do better and reach for more in our own lives…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.”
Ironically, Stuart is the most racially diverse student body in Fairfax County – which is the 10th largest student population in the United States. According to the Post:
“Almost half the school’s students — 49 percent — are Hispanic, while 24 percent are white, 14 percent are Asian and 11 percent are black. Six in 10 students at Stuart — the highest percentage in Fairfax — qualify for free or reduced-price meals, a federal measure of poverty.”
Moore and Cohen want the Fairfax County School Board to rename the school after Thurgood Marshall. Marshall represented the NAACP in the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, and served as the first African-American Supreme Court Justice.
After hearing about the student effort to change the name, Cohen told the Post that he and Moore wanted to lend their support.
“The reason why it was never changed is because students never said it was wrong,” Cohen said. “Now that’s changed...finally, there’s real momentum.”
