Ever since the Washington Post published my op-ed on Confederate monument removal last March, I have gotten quite a few calls and emails from Montgomery County residents about schools named for enslavers and white supremacists. The key passage in my 2017 op-ed reads,

But ditching a century-old memorial — celebrating a period long past, built by people long dead — doesn’t address other, more subtle markers of white supremacy, including the county’s legacy of segregated housing in residential subdivisions and apartment communities …

… One such example is Silver Spring’s E. Brooke Lee Middle School. Established in 1966, the school is named for Col. Edward Brooke Lee (1892-1984), a former Maryland secretary of state and a founder of the Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission. Lee was Lincoln confidant Francis Preston Blair’s great-grandson and the scion of a regional political dynasty. History books and academic articles uniformly describe him as the father of modern Silver Spring … As late as 1967, the septuagenarian was calling on residents to reject what he described as “Anti-White laws” that he perceived as a threat to the suburbs he built. “Desegregation is not the answer,” Lee wrote that spring…

Last month I was interviewed twice about Montgomery County’s school names, once by an area magazine reporter and the other time by the editor of the Watkins Mill High School newspaper. The high school student sent me a list of questions and he asked me to respond. His article was published today in the Gaithersburg school’s online paper, The Current.

Much of my interview didn’t make it into the final version. But, some curious comments about post-bellum white supremacists did, notably that their names were not included in the final list of schools that the student believes is problematic. About Montgomery Blair, the student wrote, “Montgomery Blair was not included in this article because there is evidence that Blair, despite growing up in a slave-owning family, never owned slaves himself.” One friend of mine on Facebook wrote about this slippery approach, “I love how Blair escaped the list.”

Reprinted below is the complete list of questions the student sent, along with my answers (in bold).

1. Do you think the county had knowledge of the history of these people before naming a high school after them?
Yes, I do believe that the County was aware that a number of prominent early citizens were enslavers. Add to that the people who came later who also were fervent white supremacists, like E. Brooke Lee (there is a middle school named for him).

2. Do you think that these names are a result of the time period when the schools were named?
Partly, yes. But I also believe that Montgomery County like other places throughout the nation has not fully sought the truth about our history nor have we sought ways to reconcile with a past that includes slavery and Jim Crow.

3. Why do you think the schools were named after people instead of the area in which they reside?
I can’t speak to the specific schools as to why they were named. But, there is a long history in the United States of naming public buildings after prominent white men.

4. Do you think that there was any significance in the choice to name Richard Montgomery High School after a slaveowner to distinguish it as a high school that, at the time, was separate from the “colored” Rockville high school?
Again, I can’t speak to the specifics because I have not researched school names in Montgomery County and the deliberations that went into them. For most of the 20th century, Montgomery County had two school systems: one for whites and the other for African Americans. To the best of my knowledge, none of the African American schools were named for people, e.g., African American community leaders. Instead, they typically were named for the community in which they were located (e.g., Takoma Park Colored School, River Road Colored School, etc.).

5.When the names were chosen do you think people would have realized this fact? And if they did, do you think they would have cared?
For most of Montgomery County’s history, it was a rigidly segregated and mainly agricultural county. The county was ruled by democratic political bosses who fought hard to keep schools, housing, and public places segregated. Because of the county’s culture, until the Cold War, any efforts to seek equity in public spaces would have been resisted. In 1948, for example, a group of more than 1,000 African American residents formed the Citizens Council for Mutual improvement and they petitioned county leaders to improve African American schools, provide water and sewer services to African American communities, and pave streets in those communities. They also asked that the Jim Crow signs be taken down in Rockville. Their requests went unanswered. 

6. The current student body at Magruder is 55.6 percent minority. If the student body realized that their high school was named after a slaveowner, what kind of effect do you think it would have?
I think the conversation about the school’s namesake is an important one to have. Changing it is one option; another is adding educational information for students and the community about the school’s namesake. That is a decision that must be made by students and the community that the school serves. The status quo, though, is not preferable since it continues to celebrate an individual and a society that enslaved people and that created conditions for subsequent generations of poverty, discrimination, and diminished opportunities for many Montgomery County residents. As a Montgomery County resident, I see nothing worth celebrating among people who enslaved others. See my answer to no. 7 for more.

7.  In your opinion, do you think that it is appropriate for these educational institutions to be named after former slave owners?
Perhaps. We can’t erase history but we can learn from it. For example, what did the enslavers do after the Civil War and during Reconstruction? Did they sell land to formerly enslaved people and enable them to build wealth as neighbors or did they cling to white supremacy and deny formerly enslaved people their civil rights? Many Montgomery County enslavers did the latter. In fact, the Blair family after the Civil War and as Reconstruction was starting bolted from Lincoln’s Republican Party back to the Democratic Party and they not only continued to embrace white supremacy and segregation but they also became active in the colonization movement which sought to relocate formerly enslaved people to Africa or the Caribbean and South America. There is nothing honorable worth celebrating among those people.