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A moderated panel of alumni and former administrators discussed Douglas S. Freeman High School’s “Rebels” nickname and potential changes during an online forum Tuesday evening.
Freeman Principal John Marshall said that he hopes to announce a decision about whether to keep or change the name by early to mid-August. Tomorrow, he will announce on freemanmascot.info the members of an advisory committee that will provide input about the topic. (Update: July 15 – Freeman officials name nickname advisory committee)
Tuesday night, Jonathan Zur and Charm Bullard from Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities moderated the panel and selected audience questions for the live-streamed panel.
A direct question and one carried through the panel was that of the meaning of the word “rebel.” Several panelists said that while the word itself represents a positive ideal, it cannot be separated from the context of the school.
Outside of the context of the Civil War, the word “rebel” has positive connotations, said panelist Harry Warner — a parent of two Freeman alumni and one current student and the current chief development officer of the American Civil War Center at Tredegar — such as being an individualist or a maverick. The context of its adoption at Freeman in 1954, however, such as the use of the Rebel Man, has made the word not inclusive for everybody.
Panelist Jamie Smith, a class of 2006 Freeman graduate, said he had similar feelings about the word in isolation, but that the context of a word is as important, if not more important, than the word itself.
“Having grown up in Richmond, Virginia, understanding the history behind the word as it relates to DSF, it’s almost impossible for me to dissociate ‘rebel’ with ‘Confederacy,’ unfortunately,” Smith said.
Although he participated in Rebel rumbles, he had a lingering feeling about what he represented as an athlete competing for the school in several sports, he said.
“For me it was always this dissociation that I would have to actively go through to say, ‘Look when we’re talking about this, I’m representing the school, I’m not representing what this word means in the historical context,’ and I think that that’s unfortunate that students would have to do that,” Smith said.
For panelist and 2018 Freeman graduate Kennedy Mackey, the meaning of the word is simple.
“The word ‘rebel,’ for me, represents a time and a place and a people who would have in no way been comfortable or an advocate for who I am today and what my reality is today,” she said.
Nothing can be done that would make her comfortable with the word, Mackey said.
“For me in my opinion, there’s no amount of re-contextualization, decontextualization, that can be done, that can change what the word ‘rebel’ means at a predominantly white school in the West End of Henrico in Richmond, Virginia, in the capital of the Confederacy,” she said.
Panelist Edward Pruden, Freeman’s principal from 2000 to 2007, also was a principal at three Richmond City public schools before he came to Freeman, he said. At each one, he had the chance to listen to Black Richmonders talk about living in the capital of the Confederacy and about the names of schools. He was uncomfortable with the name but said he didn’t think that the conversation the school is having now would have been productive then.
“I tried to use the word ‘family,’ rather than the word ‘rebel’ whenever I could, just because I was more comfortable with it, plus I thought it was good for the culture of the school,” Pruden said.
‘I can’t imagine a world without rebels’
The 2020 Rebel is different from the 1972 Rebel, said panelist Drew Bright said, a former teacher and coach of 37 years and athletic director of five years at Freeman, he said. Freeman High School has worked hard to adjust and recognize the need to update, he said, by getting rid of obvious symbols like the mascot and fight song.
Panelist Fred Facka, a Freeman graduate from the class of 1981 and president and founder of the school’s alumni association, said that he thinks of the term rebel with a broad, not myopic, definition.
“It’s a term of freedom. I can’t imagine a world without rebels, in a sense, because we are free to speak up against oppression, a status quo that may be unlawful, and those things,” Facka said. “Rebel, to me, has evolved, almost completely.”
He listed people such as Moses, Martin Luther, Martin Luther King, Arthur Ashe, Amelia Earhart, and Steve Jobs as having rebel statuses in common.
Another question for the panel and throughout the discussion was whether re-contextualizing the Rebel name could be a solution.
For some, like Mackey, a sufficient level of re-contextualization does not exist, she said.
The rebel word still has meaning, Smith said.
“Over the years, we’ve tried to dilute or reduce the association with the Confederacy, right?,” he said. “We’ve gotten rid of ‘Dixie,’ we’ve gotten rid of the Rebel Man. But diluting is not eliminating, and I think that it’s tough for folks to make the disassociation when we haven’t completely eliminated that feeling in the rebel word itself.”
Although Facka did not respond to the direct question, he spoke earlier during the conversation in favor of the Rebel name. He responded to Pruden’s mention of the Washington Redskins announcing their name change and Smith’s mention of Freeman’s former Rebel Man mascot, which he described as a wounded Confederate soldier with a bottle of moonshine.
“Rebels aren’t Redskins, and Rebels aren’t moonshine racist drunks,” Facka said.
Rather, he said rebels are necessary to society.
“No one’s here defending the past,” Facka said. “What we’re here to do is to defend the future. We need rebels in the broad sense of standing up to power.”
Adding a mascot?
Panelists mentioned the possibility of giving the school a mascot to help re-contextualize it at varying times.
Facka suggested the possibility of a new mascot, such as a horse named Rebel, and pointed out that Rebels is not technically the Freeman mascot.
“What we’re talking about is a name, a term, or a logo,” he said.
Warner spoke in favor of adopting a mascot to qualify the word ‘rebel’ as an adjective.
Bright is in favor of leaving Freeman without a mascot, he said.
“I like the idea of, quite frankly, no mascot, in terms of an icon, so that everybody can have whatever they want to come out of Rebels,” he said, with the example of “intensity and pride.”
Kennedy said, “The identity of a student does not lie in the mascot nickname or whatever of any school,” and that re-contextualization would not solve the name issue for her.
Facka mentioned Freeman alumni and the value of consistency several times. An alumnus had called him to say that if the school changed the Rebel name, the alumnus would not set foot on campus or give Freeman another dollar, he said.
“To disrupt a positive characteristic that is well within the community for decades, you could actually create a butterfly effect of abandonment, betrayal, disassociation, that I think would be irreparable,” Facka said in reference to alumni in the Richmond area.
Facka referenced the butterfly effect again later and added that changing the name could be a slippery slope.
“If we’re removing the Rebel name because of a racist connotation to some people, and I don’t deny that it may exist, and I think it comes more from outside than inside, but you risk, candidly, defaming, or smearing 30,000 people of being racists.”
Smith later said, “I promise I will not think that — if we change it — that the 30,000 alumni are racist. I don’t want that to come across at all.”
‘You’re not going to please everybody’
Current and future students should be considered, Kennedy said.
“When it comes to the conversation of making sure that we are . . . putting the feelings, emotions, and comfortability of current students and future students on the back burner to protect the emotions and comradery and pride of the 30,000 alumni . . . I don’t think that the feelings of the alumni outweighs the future of the school, and all of the alumni that are to come, all of the lessons that there are to learn, and I think that it says a lot to be ahead in this conversation rather than being retroactive later,” she said.
Pruden also spoke about the timeliness of the name change.
“I just hope that Freeman won’t be the last school to come into the 21st century,” he said, citing Lee-Davis High School in Hanover County as the school that might beat Freeman. (Although later Tuesday night, the Hanover County School Board voted 4-3 to change that school’s name, ending years of discussion.)
Society is in the heat of the moment, Facka said.
“There’s no question about the changes occurring in this country at a rapid pace,” he said. “That does not mean all change needs to happen during this period. A thoughtful, reasoned change is one thing; following an activated herd stampeding may lead us to somewhere we don’t want to go or enjoy in the future.”
A price of change is displeased people, Bright said.
“You just have to decide where the greater good is in those sorts of things,” he said. “You’re not going to please everybody.”
Panelists mentioned that the Freeman community feels like a family, and Pruden and Warner both closed by answering a question about their hope for the school as being that it continues to feel like a family.
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