Advocates: Whitewashing, again? Wilson High School must be renamed for a Black figure

With today’s deadline looming, the clock is ticking on the public’s opportunity to put forward suggestions to replace the name of racist President Woodrow Wilson on the largest, most diverse school in the District.

As leaders of the group that led the grassroots campaign to rename Woodrow Wilson High School, we are encouraged that DC Public Schools (DCPS) is using the values the school system has adopted — Students First, Equity, Excellence, Teamwork, Courage, and Joy — to guide the decision on a new name. 

And we are disturbed by the answer of some in Ward 3: Name the school for Tenleytown, the neighborhood where it sits.

As the discussion around renaming the school has progressed over the past two years, we have heard plenty of resistance voiced in neighborhood listservs and elsewhere. People who have been content to have Wilson’s name grace the school even as the truth of his white supremacist leanings has been uncovered are suddenly concerned, they say, about whether any potential Black namesake can stand up to future scrutiny.

Others apparently want to protect the Wilson brand that has boosted their children’s college admissions prospects along with real estate values in the largely wealthy neighborhood surrounding the school.

DCPS should reject a “soft WWexit” approach. Dropping just “Woodrow” from the name to maintain the school’s brand would be one such anemic response. Another would be adopting a meaningless name such as Tenleytown (the overwhelmingly white neighborhood that, with the support of federal and local government, real estate agents and developers, swallowed the one-time Black community of Reno City in the early 20th century) or Northwest High School. Unfortunately, members of the board of Wilson’s parent association have recently put forward these suggestions.

Those seemingly inoffensive names do nothing to advance the public understanding of our history or the imperative for our public institutions to lead the way to a more equitable future for every resident of this city, not just those who can afford a home in its most privileged quadrant. And they ignore the advocacy of Wilson students, who led a sit-in at Fort Reno this summer to protest racism.

As senior Racquel Jones, head of Wilson’s Student Government Association, put it at a recent meeting with DCPS representatives, to champion the name Tenleytown would “invalidate and suppress the demands of the Black and Brown community at Wilson.”

The proposed generic names suggest that just like Wilson, who famously told Black civil rights leaders that segregation was intended to help society avoid “friction,” some in our community would prefer to hide behind a bland place name rather than confront the roots of their hesitation to name a public school after a person of color.

They miss the point of the two-year campaign to jettison the name Wilson: taking a deep look not just at the 28th president but also at the racist system that he helped build in DC and that so many of us have accepted as the natural order. 

To the DCPS values guiding the choice of a new name, we add “Reparation” — the making of amends — to help uproot the structural racism that President Wilson planted in DC. The area where Wilson High School sits is the epitome of the separate and unequal DC neighborhood — a community that has prospered from the eviction of Black residents early in the 20th century to make way for exclusively white neighborhoods.

In our view, there is just one option: Wilson High School should be renamed after a Black figure to repair the damage of ignoring Black achievement over the decades. 

The decision is up to DCPS, Mayor Muriel Bowser and the DC Council, and we hope they are listening to every voice, not just a handful of vocal parent association leaders or listserv naysayers concerned with the branding of their community and home values. In fact, given that Wilson high schoolers come from all eight wards, the community Wilson sits in belongs as much to them as it does to Ward 3 residents. 

It’s time to make them feel like it.

Judith Ingram, a Wilson High School parent, and Tim Hannapel, a Wilson alumnus, are co-founders of the DC History and Justice Collective. Zerline Hughes Spruill, a Wilson parent, is a leading voice in the collective.

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