Charlotte high school named for Confederate captain may get renamed, school board leader says

Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board members plan to undertake a process that would rename Zebulon B. Vance High School, which currently takes its name from a Confederate general.

Vance, from western North Carolina, was a U.S. Senator and served two non-consecutive terms as the governor of North Carolina. Historians have long noted Vance and his family owned slaves. During the Civil War, Vance served as a Confederate military captain. Afterward he worked to keep Black people from being allowed to vote.

CMS board chair Elyse Dashew shared on Facebook Tuesday the school board’s plans to rename Vance High.

“There will be a committee made up of school community members of that school to help determine the new name,” Dashew said.

The board currently has a policy on the naming of schools that will guide the process.

Similarly, officials in Asheville are looking into renaming an elementary school that carries Vance’s name, the Citizen-Times reported Tuesday.

According to Dashew, the CMS board plans to work with historians to research other schools that may be named after Confederates, and the timeline for this will be discussed in an upcoming board meeting.

“I think Vance is a very well-known historical figure and there’s been a lot of attention about him,” Dashew said. “So, that was the clearest example.”

She said CMS board members had been having informal conversations about renaming schools among themselves, but the current momentum for anti-racism action encouraged her to begin calling other board members to put renaming on the next meeting agenda.

“While we had talked about it before, now it felt like time to really act,” Dashew said.

The board meeting will be held virtually on Tuesday, June 23, at 6 p.m.

This story was originally published June 17, 2020 at 3:22 PM.