Moore has joined forces with Oscar winning-producer Bruce Cohen, who also attend J.E.B. “Not only was Marshall the first African American Supreme Court Justice and a civil rights leader, he was our neighbor and a member of our community”. The two recently started a petition on Change.org that has collected 28,000 signatures because they think the name is offensive. “It is reprehensible to me that in this day and age a school should carry and celebrate the name of a person who fought for the enslavement of other human beings”.
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The name-change campaign comes on the heels of a similar online petition, filed last month by a group called Alumni For Change, urging the Fairfax County school board to rename J.E.B.
The school opened its doors in 1959, when Virginia officials were resisting efforts to integrate their schools.
Many current students and alumni of J.E.B. We recognize that there are legitimate concerns of students, parents and communities in these schools and whether those names best reflect their community.
“The Confederate flag was at the center of our basketball court and on our athletic letter jackets and wasn’t removed until 2001-but the symbol of Stuart on a horse waving a flag (now solid blue) remains”.
The choice to use Stuart for the school’s name was widely seen as a not-so-veiled attack on that decision. In fact, in 2013 a father in Jacksonville, Florida launched a successful petition on Change.org to rename Nathan Bedford Forrest High School. The name – honoring Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Moore attended Stuart from 1975 to 1977 before moving to Germany with her family, and Cohen graduated with the Stuart class of 1979.
“So we’re calling on the Fairfax County School Board to rename it Thurgood Marshall High School”. A star of such films as “Boogie Nights”, “The End of the Affair” and the “Hunger Games” series, she won a Best Actress Oscar earlier this year for her role in “Still Alice”. Nearly half the school’s students – 49 percent – are Hispanic, while 24 percent are white, 14 percent are Asian and 11 percent are black.
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Charley Gallay/Getty Images for TWC Director David O. Russell, producer Bruce Cohen and Julianne Moore are pictured in 2013. Lawmakers in South Carolina eliminated the Accomplice flag from its statehouse grounds and a nationwide debate regarding symbols from the Confederacy has continued within the wake of the capturing.
