About 2,500 people have signed a petition to change the name of Lee High School in Huntsville.
This is not the first time there’s been public debate over renaming the high school. Six years ago students were outraged when then Superintendent Dr. Casey Wardynski proposed changing the name, now some students say they feel differently.
“We shouldn’t have kept the name of a person who didn’t want us there in the first place,” said Myrakal Willie a senior at Lee High School.
Willie is part of the 70 percent African American student body who attend Lee. She and 2,489 others have signed a petition on Change.org to have the name of the school changed.
“It’s very strange that we kept the name in the first place, because back then it was a predominately white school and it was named after Robert E. Lee which was a Confederate general. Now in 2017 the school is predominately black.”
Lee High School was built four years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed school segregation in America. The creators of the petition said, “the naming of the school was a clear statement that Lee High School was for white students only and that Huntsville City Schools had no intention of complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
A second petition to keep the Lee High School name was started five days ago. It’s already garnered 2,999 signatures.
“It’s not a matter of race, it’s just the matter of the name of the school I went to and my kids went to and I don’t see the need for change,” said alumni Thomas Hooper.
Students behind the petition want to rename the school Paulette R. Turner, after the school’s first African American student. Turner went on to have a career as an IBM executive.
“I don’t really hear a lot of black schools named after black people, we usually have schools named after famous white people,” said alumni Triston Heard.
The petition will be delivered to mayor Tommy Battle and the Huntsville City School Board. We reached out to Huntsville City Schools but the district declined to comment.
