In 1971, I was a fifth-grade student at J.E.B. Stuart Elementary School in Richmond, Va. My younger brother and sister and I left our home in the morning and walked the leafy avenues to the two-story brick building with the handsome rotunda greeting us on arrival.
I have fond memories of the school. The long lunch breaks where we frolicked on the asphalt playground; my first crush; and bonding with a clever, popular student who became my tennis buddy and best friend.
But, as an 11-year-old, though I didn’t have the language and maturity to articulate it, I was puzzled by why Stuart Elementary carried the name of a Confederate general. When I attended the school, more than 90 percent of its student body looked like me. They were African-American.
General Stuart was a racist. His Confederate ideas supported White supremacy and he fought in the Civil War to preserve slavery. If he had his way, all of the Black children who walked past his name each week to enter the school would never have been able to do so. Their parents and grandparents would have been enslaved people and the little Black children who populated J.E.B. Stuart would have been born slaves, too.
I don’t know if it was triumphant or tragic that we got to go to a school named for Stuart, but I do know it never should have come to be.
So, I was glad to receive the news that when students, of which 90 percent still are Black, return to the building this fall, they will not be greeted by the name and memory of someone who fought to vanquish them into lives of servitude. The Richmond School Board recently voted to rename the school Barack Obama Elementary.
To grow up in the South, in Richmond, the former Capital of the Confederacy, in the 1970s was to grow up in the harsh light of segregation. There was little attempt to even keep it in the shadows. That my elementary school was 90 percent African-American reflected the racially segregated composition of neighborhoods and a mindset and legacy of mostly White city leadership that social and educational apartheid was standard and acceptable. School attendance was assigned based on where you lived. Where you lived was largely controlled by economic, housing, and racial structures that divided our city. If you lived in a Black neighbor, you went to a Black school.
