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.
Early civil rights supporter Jean Graetz dies in Alabama
Jean Graetz, an early white supporter of equal rights for Black people in Alabama at the start of the civil rights movement, died early Wednesday, a family spokesman said. Recently diagnosed with lung cancer, Graetz died at home less than three months after the death of husband Robert Graetz, the only white minister to openly support the Montgomery bus boycott, said Ken Mullinax, a friend who announced her death on behalf of the family. She was 90. “She was one of the finest people I ever knew,” Mullinax said. “I could just cry right now.” Jean and Robert Graetz moved to Alabama in 1955, the same year Black seamstress and activist Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of a city bus, sparking a yearlong boycott that often is considered the start of the modern civil rights movement. A young pastor at the time, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. rose to national prominence during months of protests that ended when the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that segregated public buses were unconstitutional. In a state where racial segregation was the law and relatively few white people supported change, Jean and Robert Graetz were friends with Parks, King and his late wife Coretta Scott King, said Mullinax. Known as “Jeannie” to many, Jean Graetz was a “full partner” with her husband in openly, actively supporting civil rights, he said. “She was at the vanguard of the birth of the modern civil rights movement,” said Mullinax, who also is the spokesman at historically black Alabama State University, where Jean Graetz graduated with an education degree five years ago at age 85. Graetz, the minister of the majority-Black Trinity Lutheran Evangelical Church in Montgomery, was the only white clergyman in the area to support the boycott. He and his wife faced harassment, threats, and bombings as a result. The parsonage where the couple lived was twice targeted by bombs, once when they were away and again in 1957, not long after the boycott ended, in a wave of attacks on civil rights leaders and churches. Speaking earlier this year in an interview with a Lutheran publication, Jean Graetz said their activism was linked to the idea of “beloved community,” a vision of love and justice that King sometimes mentioned. “There is no such thing as race,” she said. “Scientists know this; we all have the same DNA, we’re all brothers and sisters, and we need to act like this is true.” Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.
