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As the debate about whether to change Douglas Freeman High School’s “Rebels” nickname escalates, a group of recent alumni from the school believe the focus is misplaced.
It’s not the nickname that should be changed, they wrote in a petition – it’s the name of the school itself.
“For years, we have been thinking about it wrong,” the group – Victoria Getter, Kennedy Mackey, Mary Katherine West and Sarandon Elliot – wrote. “In reality, the Rebel (and the Rebel Man) is just that, a mascot: a symbol and a symptom of deeper issues in the institution it represents."
Douglas Freeman himself, the alumni wrote, does not deserve to have his name attached to a school that seeks to promote equity among its student body. As of June 11, their petition to change the name of the school had collected more than 980 signatures.
Freeman, born in 1886, was a journalist, author and historian who is best known for serving 34 years as the editor of The Richmond News Leader and for his Pulitzer Prize-winning biographies of George Washington and Robert E. Lee – the latter of whom his father had served for four years in the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia.
But he is responsible for contributing to the “Lost-Cause” ideology, which shouldn’t be celebrated, the alumni wrote.
“This propaganda movement began as a effort to minimize the relationship between the Civil War and slavery,” the alumni wrote. “Freeman painted Lee and the confederate soldiers as courageous and valiant men while warping and erasing the role of slavery and its harm and violence towards Black people.
“Though contexts have changed, Freeman’s ideology and the violence that stems from it still exist within the halls of Freeman High School.”
At the school that bears his name, the group wrote, “rampant second-generation segregation” still exists. They claimed that the school’s two cafeterias typically amounted to one for affluent white students and another for minorities.
“White students routinely referred to the opposite room as the ‘ghettoteria,’” they wrote.
The authors of the petition graduated from the school between 2017 and 2019.
They further alleged that the newspaper and year book are “expensive and inaccessible to all students” and their staffs are “overwhelmingly white” – creating the same centering of white perspectives in documenting student lives that existed years ago.
Black students face the difficult decision about whether to wear school clothing that carries names by which they may feel oppressed, the alumni wrote.
“The decision to wear school paraphernalia should never cause a sense of discomfort for any student, especially not because of their race, culture or heritage. However, this is the current case at Freeman,” they wrote.
In establishing their petition, the alumni were not attempting to erase history, they wrote.
“We are calling to re-examine whose history has been written and which narratives and perspectives have been intentionally and systemically left out. We are calling for a more inclusive and empowering environment for all students.”
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