Woodrow Wilson High School renamed after August Wilson
The District’s schools chancellor on Tuesday proposed renaming Woodrow Wilson High in Northwest Washington after August Wilson, the celebrated playwright known for his revelatory works about the African American experience in the 20th century.
The change, pending approval from the D.C. Council, could take effect at the beginning of the 2021-2022 academic year.
The proposal follows years of calls from many in the community to remove Woodrow Wilson’s name from the school, citing policies during his presidency that pushed Black Washingtonians out of the now predominantly White neighborhood where the high school is located. Wilson is the city’s largest public high school.
Schools Chancellor Lewis D. Ferebee said he selected August Wilson after more than a year of gathering community input, which included more than 2,000 nomination submissions and 6,000 responses to a survey last fall. He said August Wilson was the preferred choice among nearly all groups, including students, alumni and community members.
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“At DCPS, where a majority of our school leaders and students, and nearly half of our teachers identify as Black, we are committed to fulfilling the efforts of social activism and ensuring that the names we call our schools reflect our values and commitment to diversity,” Ferebee said in a statement.
The renaming comes at a moment of reckoning in the nation as communities grapple with the country’s legacy of slavery and racism. Cities have removed statues honoring Confederate leaders following fiery debates and have changed school names across the country.
The discussion around renaming Woodrow Wilson High has been simmering in D.C. for years, gaining traction after a 2015 protest by Princeton University students calling to take the 28th president’s name off its campus buildings. Wilson had served at president of the Ivy League university. The school decided last year to remove his name from a residential college and its school of public and international affairs.
The conversation in D.C. focused more on his local legacy. Community members wanted the public to acknowledge that Wilson’s policies laid the groundwork for dismantling the Black community in upper Northwest Washington.
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When Wilson took office in 1913, the District had a large Black population, many with well-paying jobs and careers with the federal government. Advocates of removing his name say Wilson impeded the progress of Black residents by making it harder for them to land jobs in public service.
Other contenders floated as a new namesake of the high school included Vincent Reed, the first Black principal at Wilson and a former D.C. schools superintendent; former mayor Marion Barry; and Edna Jackson, the first Black teacher at Wilson High.
The DC History and Justice Collective, which advocated the name change, called on the D.C. Council to reject the chancellor’s proposal. The group tweeted that it had sought to rename the school after an African American who had ties to the D.C. community to honor a part of history that had been erased from Northwest Washington.
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City officials “missed the mark by choosing to retain the toxic Wilson brand” instead of elevating a Black D.C. educator such as Jackson or Reed, the collective tweeted.
Wilson High’s student newspaper wrote last year that the school should be renamed after Jackson.
August Wilson’s plays are currently part of the school system’s high school curriculum, Ferebee said. Wilson, who was Black, was born in 1945 and died in 2005. He won multiple Tony Awards and Pulitzer Prizes. Among his most famous works was “Fences,” a 1985 play about a working-class Black family living in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. The play was adapted into a movie with Denzel Washington in 2016.
The Wilson High community is not the only D.C. school community to call on the city to change its name. In 2018, the District renamed Orr Elementary as Boone Elementary. The student body discovered that Benjamin Grayson Orr, a D.C. mayor in the 19th century, was an enslaver. The D.C. Council approved the proposal to rename the school after Lawrence E. Boone, the principal who led the school for more than two decades.
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In 2020, a D.C. government committee released a report recommending that dozens of names be removed from public buildings based on several criteria, including whether they enslaved people, created laws that oppressed women and minorities, or committed acts that would violate D.C. human rights law. More than a dozen schools were on the list, including Wilson High.
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