J.E.B Stuart High School: Multiracial Youth Battle Racist Legacy

FALLS CHURCH, VIRGINIA July 28—A multiracial group of students in the Social Justice Club at J.E.B. Stuart High School are leading a fight to change their school’s shameful racist name. J.E.B. Stuart was a Confederate general who fought and died to preserve slavery. The school mascot was a Confederate cavalryman, a raider, flying a Confederate battle flag. Recognizing the Confederate flag’s offensiveness, school officials shaded out the flag in 2001 so it looks like a solid blue pennant. But everyone knows they simply painted over a flagrant symbol of racism and that the raider was still fighting to preserve slavery. Today’s students have made a video declaring they are not raiders! (http://bit.ly/2aSPchz)
The students have pressed the issue in the school and community, among alumni and at the meetings of the Fairfax County School Board (FCSB). Today, the FCSB voted 10-2, after a year of debate and community meetings including one that involved 150 participants, to establish a working group to study the issue further. The compromise was necessary because there were insufficient votes among FCSB members to agree to a name change now. One student leader declared of this meeting, “There were many supporters, representing alumni, local organizations, and parents. That aspect was wonderful to witness. However, it was a painful meeting in many ways because most of the school board clearly does not feel that changing the name is important.”
The students and their supporters are determined to carry this struggle forward in the coming year.
Members of the Progressive Labor Party have been engaged in school board events and community meetings where they have presented antiracist arguments to change the name, and met with faculty fighters, community residents, and students to build the struggle and link it to the broader fight against racism and capitalism. PLP members also engaged in discussions with older white classmates at the 50th reunion of the Class of 1966, in a challenging but important attempt to win old friends to antiracism. Not all alumni were prepared to bury the school’s racist namesake, but many others wanted to see the name changed and were excited to learn more of the history in order to argue more effectively.
Virginia’s Racist History
The school was opened in 1959 during the Massive Resistance movement in Virginia. Massive Resistance, led by Governor Harry F. Byrd, fought to preserve racial segregation in Virginia schools in defiance of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education, that mandated desegregation throughout the nation. The all-white FCSB and the superintendent resisted desegregation as long as possible, despite another court decision that hammered Virginia’s refusal to desegregate. Only a handful of Black students were able to enter J.E.B. Stuart High School between 1961 and 1965.
Meanwhile, the school bosses named J.E.B. Stuart High School, the FCSB also renamed Franconia High School for another Confederate general, Robert E. Lee.  These namings are reflective of Fairfax County’s active racist campaign against integration that lasted until 1965.
Confederate Generals Lee and Stuart fought in the U.S. Civil War to preserve the enslavement of four million Black people. Before the Civil War, Stuart served in the U.S. Army and beat and arrested John Brown, a militant fighter against slavery, at Harper’s Ferry. When the Civil War began, Stuart resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and joined the Confederacy in order to fight for the “Virginia way of life”, aka slavery, a system so brutal that many slave-owners calculated they could maximize profits if they worked an adult male slave to death in seven years. During the war, Stuart led a raid into Chestertown, Pennsylvania, where he captured eight free Black workers and re-enslaved them in Virginia.
Racist Symbols Lead to Racist Actions
Confederate flags and symbols of racism are unacceptable. Honoring a racist history promotes racism today. Dylann Roof, who murdered nine Black people in a church in South Carolina, proudly displayed the Confederate battle flag and other white supremacist imagery on the internet. KKK marches and rallies lead to increased anti-Black and anti-immigrant racist violence. Racist words and symbols encourage racist actions, so fighting to remove racist symbols is part of the broader antiracist and anticapitalist fight. When government agencies insist on honoring the Confederacy, it shows that capitalist governments do not want to end racism. They support racism to help maintain capitalism.
J.E.B. Stuart High School Today
Today, J.E.B. Stuart is the most diverse high school in Fairfax County: 51 percent Latin, 25 white, 10 Black, 14 Asian. Students here are, through their determined advocacy, following the leadership of fighters from such places as Baltimore, Ferguson, and Baton Rouge. They brought the antiracist fight to their school and to the FCSB when they launched a campaign over a year ago to change the name of the school.  Allied alumni in turn gathered nearly 35,000 signatures on an online petition to change the school’s name.
The Struggle Ahead
The key measure of success in this battle, beyond the change in the school’s name itself, is whether the multiracial group of youth leading this fight link racist oppression and ideology to its roots in capitalism. PLP will continue to struggle with them to broaden the fight to include action against police brutality, mass incarceration, and violent white supremacist groups like the Klan and neo-Nazis. Hopefully, this struggle will create lifelong fighters for a society that values equality and not racism. That society will banish the ghosts of a brutal Confederacy to the dustbin of history. Instead, it will honor the antiracists in Virginia who confronted slavery and later Jim Crow segregation, often paying with their lives: Gabriel Prosser, who attempted to lead a revolution against slavery in Richmond in 1800; Nat Turner, who led a major slave rebellion in Southampton in 1831; John Brown and Osbourne Anderson, who led the raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859; and E. B. Henderson and Jacob Tinner, who founded the first rural chapter of the NAACP in Falls Church in 1915. It was the courage, conviction, and sacrifice of these unsung heroes that paved the way for today’s struggle. It is the job of members and friends of PLP to enlist a new generation of courageous antiracist fighters!