The D.C. Council has introduced a measure that would rename Woodrow Wilson High School in Northwest Washington to Jackson Reed High — an unusual objection to the Bowser administration, which proposed renaming the school after playwright August Wilson.
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When it comes to name changes, the council typically approves the mayor’s suggestion, as it did on Tuesday with a vote to rename an elementary school after the late congressman John Lewis. But the high-profile push to rename Wilson High has garnered significant public interest. A coalition to change the name drew public attention to President Woodrow Wilson’s racist policies that pushed Black residents out of the now mostly White and wealthy neighborhood where the school is located.
While there was support for renaming the school after African American playwright August Wilson, many people wanted the school to be named after someone with ties to the community. At a D.C. Council hearing this month on the name change, many residents testified that they objected to the mayor’s proposal.
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Council Chairman Phil Mendelson (D) echoed those concerns at a council meeting Tuesday. August Wilson, he said, has “no connection to Wilson High School other than that his plays are in the curriculum.”
Some residents suggested the school be renamed after Vincent Reed, the school’s first Black principal and later the head of the D.C. school system, and Edna Jackson, who became the first Black teacher at the once all-White Wilson High school a year after Bolling v. Sharpe desegregated schools in the nation’s capital. (C. Melvin Sharpe, who defended segregation in that case, still has a school campus in Ward 4 named for him.)
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Wilson High’s student newspaper editorialized last year that the school should be renamed after Jackson.
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The council agreed Tuesday to postpone the decision until after another public discussion can be convened about the name. Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (D-Ward 5), an alumnus of the school, asked whether simply Jackson would be a better name than Jackson Reed, suggesting that the first African American woman to have a D.C. public high school named for her should not have to share the name with a man. Others debated whether “Jackson Reed” ought to be hyphenated.
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The discussion around renaming Woodrow Wilson High has been simmering in D.C. for years, gaining traction after a 2015 protest by Princeton University students called for taking the 28th president’s name off its campus buildings. Wilson had served as president of the Ivy League university. The university decided last year to remove his name from a residential college and its school of public and international affairs.
In March, when the Bowser administration announced the August Wilson School proposal, D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee explained he selected August Wilson after more than a year of gathering community input, which included more than 2,000 nomination submissions and 6,000 responses to a survey last fall. He said August Wilson was the preferred choice among nearly all groups, including students, alumni and community members.
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Wilson, who died in 2005, won multiple Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. Among his most famous works is “Fences,” a 1985 play about a working-class Black family living in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. The play was adapted into a movie starring Denzel Washington and Viola Davis in 2016.
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But Mendelson questioned Ferebee’s finding that the playwright was the most popular choice for a namesake. “It was clear to me, looking at the comments, that there were people who picked August Wilson not because they wanted to honor August Wilson but because they wanted to not change the name of the school," he said.
In 2018, the District renamed Orr Elementary to Boone Elementary after the student body discovered that Benjamin Grayson Orr, a D.C. mayor in the 19th century, had been a enslaver. The D.C. Council approved the proposal to rename the school after Lawrence E. Boone, the principal who led the school for more than two decades.
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In July, Bowser proposed renaming West Elementary School after the late Georgia congressman and civil rights icon John Lewis. West is currently named for Joseph Rodman West, a Union general during and after the Civil War who went on to serve as a senator from Louisiana.
In 1863, Apache leader Mangas Coloradas reportedly told U.S. troops that he wanted to make peace, and approached West under a peace flag. West is said to have ordered the Native American leader killed. The D.C. Council took the first step in approving that name change on Tuesday; it will require another two votes to take effect.