Alabama’s capital removes Confederate names from 2 schools
Two high schools in Alabama’s capital, a hub of the civil rights movement, will no longer bear the names of Confederate leaders. The Montgomery County Board of Education on Thursday voted for new names for Jefferson Davis High School and Robert E. Lee High School, news outlets reported. Lee will become Dr. Percy Julian High School. Davis will become JAG High School, representing three figures of the civil rights movement: Judge Frank Johnson, the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, and the Rev. Robert Graetz. The schools opened in the 1950s and 1960s as all or mostly white but now serve student populations that are more than 85% African American. “Our job is to make our spaces comfortable for our kids. Bottom line is we’re going to make decisions based on what our kids’ needs may be, not necessarily on sentiment around whatever nostalgia may exist,” Superintendent Melvin Brown said, as reported by WSFA-TV. Julian was a chemist and teacher who was born in Montgomery. Johnson was a federal judge whose rulings helped end segregation and enforce voting rights. Abernathy was a pastor and leader in the civil rights movement. Graetz was the only white pastor who openly supported the Montgomery bus boycott and became the target of scorn and bombings for doing so. The new school names were given two years after education officials vowed to strip the Confederate namesakes. A debate over the school names began amid protests over racial inequality following the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota. Someone ripped down a statue of Lee outside his namesake school during the demonstrations. Like many other Confederate-named schools, Lee — named for the Confederate Army general — opened as an all-white school in 1955 as the South was actively fighting integration. Davis, named for the Confederate president, opened in 1968. But white flight after integration orders and shifting demographics meant the schools became heavily African American. The Montgomery City Council last year voted to rename Jeff Davis Avenue for attorney Fred D. Gray. Gray grew up on the street during the Jim Crow era and went on to represent clients, including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. After the street name change, the Alabama attorney general’s office told city officials to pay a $25,000 fine or face a lawsuit for violating a state law protecting Confederate monuments and other longstanding memorials. The city paid the fine in order to remove the Confederate reference. Republished with the permission of The Associated Press.
Alabama Capital renames Confederate street to honor civil rights leader Fred Gray
The first capital of the Confederacy has renamed a street honoring the Confederate president to recognize a Black civil rights lawyer instead, despite an Alabama law meant to protect rebel monuments and memorials. The Montgomery City Council voted Tuesday night to rename Jeff Davis Avenue for attorney Fred D. Gray, who grew up on the street during the Jim Crow era and went on to represent clients including Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. “When I think of heroes who exemplify the best in our city, (Gray) is certainly at the forefront of that,” said Mayor Steven Reed, the city’s first Black mayor. He initially proposed the change in December. The City Council’s unanimous approval could prompt a $25,000 fine under a state law passed in 2017 to prevent the removal or alteration of Confederate monuments, which have been challenged and taken down across the South, but Reed told news outlets donors already had offered to pay the penalty for the city, where delegates voted to form the Confederacy in 1861. Gray, 90, still practices law in Tuskegee, located east of Montgomery. He told the Montgomery Advertiser the city had kept him informed. “This is a project of the mayor’s,” he said. “He expressed it to me. I was very happy about it. And I am very happy about it.” Gray was a young lawyer when Parks was arrested for refusing to give her bus seat to a white man in 1955 in defiance of the city’s segregation laws. He represented both her and King, then a young pastor who led the yearlong bus boycott that followed. Gray is currently representing Tuskegee residents in a lawsuit aimed at removing a Confederate monument from a public square in the nearly all-Black city. A spokesman for the attorney general’s office didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment on whether the state would attempt to collect fine money from the city for renaming the street. The state recently collected a $25,000 fine after suing officials in Huntsville, where the county removed a Confederate memorial outside the county courthouse last year. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
