Douglas S. Freeman High School Principal John Marshall with a sign displaying the school’s new nickname, Mavericks. The school dropped its “Rebels” nickname this summer to disassociate itself from Confederate symbols. (Photo by Julianne Tripp)
As last year’s Black Lives Matter protests spotlighted racial injustice and pushed Richmond to take down Confederate monuments, the nation’s reckoning with race has also prompted local school systems to shed names and mascots that honor figures who supported slavery.
Henrico County’s Douglas S. Freeman High School announced in August that its student groups and sports teams would no longer be called the Rebels, a nickname used by the school since its opening in 1954. Principal John Marshall says the decision followed a monthslong review that involved a panel of former Freeman staff and students, as well as a public input process that resulted in more than 2,000 comments and 1,500 online responses.
In November 2020, Marshall revealed the school’s new moniker, the Mavericks, which he says was chosen in collaboration with the VCU Brandcenter to better reflect Freeman’s core values of inclusion and independence.
“We’re excited that Mavericks is part of who we are,” he says. “We blaze our own trail, we stand out from the herd, we speak for ourselves, but [now] have no ties to ... a terrible time in our state and nation’s history, no ties to the Confederacy. We’re excited to start our next chapter.”
Prior discussions around the Rebels nickname led the school to stop using a Confederate soldier as its mascot and reframe its meaning to be “someone who challenges the status quo” rather than dropping it entirely, he says, though its lingering ties to the Civil War continued making some students uneasy. Freeman High School hasn’t used its “Rebel Man” mascot since at least 2007, according to a Henrico Citizen report.
“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,” said Kennedy Mackey, a Spelman College student and 2018 Freeman graduate, during a virtual panel discussion on the name change this summer. “There’s no amount of recontextualization that can be done [to] change what the word ‘Rebel’ means at a predominantly white school in the West End of Henrico.”
Meanwhile, Hanover County’s school board voted by a thin 4-3 margin this summer to rename Lee-Davis High School and Stonewall Jackson Middle School to Mechanicsville High School and Bell Creek Middle School.
In all cases, vocal segments of the Henrico and Hanover communities advocated for the changes for at least a decade before their eventual passage. Hanover NAACP President Robert Barnette says calls to rename the two Hanover County schools date back to 1970.
“There is a place for those names, and if we put them ... in the history books [or] museums, that’s fine, but [they] shouldn’t be plastered on a public building that we pay taxes for, and that Black and brown kids have to enter every day,” Barnette says.
Not everyone supported the changes. A Change.org petition to reinstate Freeman High School’s Confederate mascot garnered more than 1,200 signatures as of 2015, while Freeman alumni association founder Fred Facka said this summer that he “couldn’t imagine a world without Rebels.”
“We’re all Rebels. … It’s a term of freedom,” he added during the panel discussion. “We are free to speak up against oppression, a status quo that may be unlawful. So Rebel, to me, has evolved almost completely.”
In Hanover, the school board turned down a petition to change the schools’ names in 2018, electing to keep them by a 5-2 vote. The rejection motivated the Hanover NAACP to file a lawsuit against the school division, alleging that the names violated the constitutional rights of Black students, Barnette says, though the suit was ultimately dismissed by a judge weeks before George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis.
“We’re excited to start our next chapter.” —John Marshall, principal of Douglas S. Freeman High School
“The George Floyd incident that sparked racial tensions across the country and the [removal] of statues in Richmond really fueled the advocacy of several groups, including Hanover NAACP,” Barnette says. “It’s unfortunate that someone had to lose their life for this to happen, but ... I think [it] was evidence that things can change if people continue to bring up their views.”
Hanover County School Board Chairman John Axselle III, who voted against changing the school names this summer, declined to comment for this story, and Vice Chair Ola Hawkins, who supported the renaming, did not respond to a request for comment.
Changes didn’t just occur at the K-12 level. In December, workers began removing plaques and other forms of signage honoring Confederate figures throughout Virginia Commonwealth University’s campus at the direction of the VCU Board of Visitors. Building names including McGuire Hall, Baruch Auditorium, Ginter House, the Jefferson Davis Memorial Chapel, the Tompkins-McCaw Library and the Wood Memorial Building are all set to be removed.
“It is clear that the values represented by these [names] and symbols run counter to the values to which we are committed — inclusion, equity and diversity,” VCU President Michael Rao said in a statement.
In late 2020, a John Tyler Community College task force recommended that the institution be renamed. Tyler, the 10th president of the United States, owned slaves, supported secession and was elected to the Confederate Congress before his death in 1862. The name replacement process is expected to extend into 2021.
In a message to students, John Tyler President Edward Raspiller wrote that the panel also suggested that the Chesterfield County college rename two buildings honoring former state politicians Mills Godwin and Lloyd Bird, both proponents of the Massive Resistance movement that sought to prevent desegregation in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling in 1954. Although the John Tyler buildings will be renamed, Mills E. Godwin High School in Henrico and L.C. Bird High School in Chesterfield continue to bear the politicians’ names.
However, Virginia Center for Inclusive Communities President Jonathan Zur cautions that while name changes are weighty milestones, they should mark the beginning, not the end, of wider institutional efforts to be more inclusive. Zur’s organization, which facilitates workshops in schools to promote educational equity, led the virtual panel centered around Freeman’s mascot change.
“One of the challenges that I have observed is that when there are flashpoint moments, these are the types of things that are the most tangible to be able to quickly change,” he says. “I’m fearful that there will be some people in the community who go back to business as usual or think that we’ve resolved the issue, when in fact, at every school, you could find other ways that disparities and inequities persist along lines of race and class.”
