Activist Requests Names of Two High Schools be Changed

by WAKA Action 8 News

Two high schools in town are named after confederate leaders, Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis.
And that’s not sitting well with some, who say the schools buildings need to be renamed.
 

Civil Rights Activist and State Senator Hank Sander’s wife Faya Rose Toure stood before the Montgomery County School Board Tuesday night fired up.

“I know you’re cutting me off,” she says to school board members. “Let me tell you this, you cannot cut off the truth. Eventually these schools will be not named after extremists.”

Toure says those extremists were Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee. Both were confederates who fought against the freedom of African Americans during the Civil War and Toure says the names of the high schools must change.

“You have a majority black board and you allow monuments of hate to be on public property, where black and white and brown children have to enter those doors everyday and pass a monument after Robert E. Lee, who believed slavery was willed by God.”

We wanted to hear what parents thought, so we asked them. Should the schools be renamed?

“It doesn’t matter who the school is,” says parent Rosalyn Stokes. “My child is the one that is going to be a reflection of her education. She’s not going to be a reflection of Robert E. Lee.”

“It’s better now than it was then so I don’t have a problem with it,” says father O’neal Courtland.

Montgomery Public Schools Superintendent Margaret Allen says the issue hasn’t been on her radar.

” I truly don’t have an answer for that,” she tells us. “I understood clearly what she was indicating but there are always other sides to how to look at things.”

“I don’t really think a lot of parents are concerned about it or the children,” says parent Jackie Thomas. “Some of them don’t even know the history of it.”

Toure admits some students may not know who the two confederates were. Which is why she also asked board members to teach them about African history.

“If you don’t understand the impact of having to go into a school named after somebody that enslaved you, think of the Jews. Can you imagine a Jewish person naming any building after a nazi?”

You heard from some parents who didn’t mind the names of the schools.. But we did speak with other parents who didn’t want to go on camera, who told me they DO want the names of the schools to be changed.

Faya Rose Toure came before the school board now because she says it’s timely with next year being the 50th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act and the 150th anniversary of the end of slavery.