Two Fairfax County magisterial districts are poised to be renamed because of their association with slavery — part of the larger reckoning over Virginia’s history as a Confederate state that has also included taking down monuments and renaming some streets and highways.
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At a meeting Tuesday night, the Fairfax County Redistricting Advisory Committee recommended that the names of the Lee and Sully districts be changed, though it didn’t suggest alternatives. The county’s Board of Supervisors will begin formally considering the recommendations next week.
“In short, the names we give to our homes and communities should celebrate the best achievements and individuals linked to county history,” the 20-member redistricting committee wrote in a report of recommendations, which it unanimously voted Tuesday night to submit to the county board.
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Formed initially as a county township in the late 1800s, the Lee District was named after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee or one of his family members who enslaved people, the committee concluded after reviewing local history and hearing testimony from county residents.
The Sully District was created after the 1990 Census reflected a need for better representation in the fast-growing western portions of Fairfax. It was named after the site of a slavery plantation owned by Richard Bland Lee, an uncle of Robert E. Lee’s who served as Northern Virginia’s first member of Congress during the late 1700s, the committee found.
Both names violate the spirit of the county’s One Fairfax policy, which seeks to weave racial and social equity into every aspect of county government, the committee said.
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The reexamination of those districts, plus three others for which the committee did not recommend name changes — Mount Vernon, Mason and Springfield — was part of a broader, often heated discussion over how to reconcile Virginia’s history as a Confederate state with its changing demographics. That debate gained new energy in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020 by a Minneapolis police officer.
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Since then, dozens of Confederate monuments have been taken down, and some major highways — including Lee Highway and Jefferson Davis Highway — have either been renamed or are in the process of being renamed in various portions of the state.
Fairfax created an inventory of nearly 160 places in the county with Confederate names, including parks and neighborhood streets, that could be the subject of future renaming conversations.
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The conversations around the Lee and Sully districts became part of the county’s decennial redistricting process, in which local election maps have been redrawn to better match changes in population and demographics.
Supervisor Rodney L. Lusk (D-Lee) was an early proponent of having his district renamed. After protests over Floyd’s death and police brutality raged in cities across the country, Lusk, the board’s sole Black member, began holding community meetings about separating his district’s name from the legacy of slavery in Virginia.
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Homages to Lee and other Confederate leaders were a fact of life in Virginia for years, said Lusk, who grew up in Alexandria, where a Confederate statue was prominently displayed for 131 years before being removed in 2020.
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After Floyd’s death, “It became clear that we needed to have some conversations about things that had been pushed under the rug,” Lusk said Wednesday. “As a government, we have to decide if what we’re going to do is right.”
Lusk noted that a high school in his district that bore Lee’s name was recently renamed John R. Lewis High School, after the late congressman and civil rights icon.
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Though there has been some community opposition to changing the Lee District name, the support outweighs it, Lusk said. So far, new names under consideration include Franconia, Huntley, Laurel Grove and Dogue Creek, he said.
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Supervisor Kathy L. Smith (D-Sully) said she is keeping an open mind on whether her district should be renamed. Unlike Lusk, she had waited for the redistricting committee’s recommendations before meeting with constituents about the issue.
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“It’s going to depend on how people feel about it,” Smith said. “Is there a right answer? I don’t know.”
At the committee’s virtual meeting Tuesday night, the leader of a prominent group of local civic associations voiced his organization’s opposition to renaming the Sully District.
Jeffrey Parnes, the president of the Sully District Council of Citizens Associations, argued that the name has ties to France, where there is a village of Sully and a town of Sully. Moreover, Parnes told the committee, it wouldn’t make sense to change the Sully name while keeping the names of districts such as Mount Vernon, which was George Washington’s plantation and a home to enslaved people.
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“Many things in former slave states have those connotations,” he said, arguing that those places and names have since developed new meaning to their communities.
The argument reflected the challenges the committee faced in balancing what local residents want with a directive to consider Confederate ties and whether districts’ names accurately reflect their communities.
That was the debate with the Springfield District, which no longer includes most of the greater Springfield area after its boundaries were redrawn three decades ago.
The committee deliberated over whether Springfield was named after Springfield Farm, another plantation, or after the natural springs that were part of the landscape when the county was formed in 1742.
With Supervisor Pat Herrity (R-Springfield) and some residents lobbying hard against a name change, the committee decided in a 12-to-5 straw vote last month that there wasn’t a compelling enough reason to recommend that the district be renamed.