Introducing Julius L. Chambers High. CMS drops Vance High’s Confederate namesake

Zebulon B. Vance High School is now Julius L. Chambers High School, dropping its Confederate namesake in honor of the civil rights icon whose legal work led to the desegregation of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools in the 1970s.

The CMS board voted 8-0 to approve the name change, citing the importance of recognizing history.

“Names and symbols should reflect our values,” Superintendent Earnest Winston said in a statement. “They speak to who we are and what we aspire to do. Mr. Chambers was a major figure in civil rights locally and nationally, bringing cases that shaped our laws to the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Chambers, who died in 2013, was a renowned civil rights attorney whose work directly shaped CMS. His work included a landmark Supreme Court case that mandated countywide busing to integrate CMS, among others.

Black board members said that Chambers’ work directly touched their lives, enabling them to pursue careers in paths that may have been closed to them without his work on integration.

Ruby Jones said she completed her education in segregated schools, but was able to launch her career as an educator in an integrated school system, thanks to Chambers’ work. While the district had taken steps backwards on integration, she said, there are lessons to be learned from history.

Thelma Byers-Bailey said Chambers was instrumental to her receiving a scholarship from the NAACP Legal Defense Fund while she was in law school, which allowed her to cover additional educational costs.

Milestone case

In 1965, Chambers brought forth a lawsuit on behalf of Darius Swann, whose son was assigned to an all-Black school, even though the family lived in a neighborhood zoned for an integrated school. Despite the district’s desegregation plan at the time, most Black students were still assigned to all-Black schools.

The case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court in 1971, which held that busing was an appropriate remedy to desegregate public schools. The ruling led to immediate backlash in Charlotte, where white parents hurled rocks at buses, Black and white students fought, and small riots closed some area schools.

But for three decades, the ruling led to CMS being one of the country’s most integrated districts. That integration plan was ultimately overturned in the early 2000s, when a white parent sued the district alleging that his daughter did not get into a magnet program because of her race.

School board member Lenora Shipp, a former CMS student and principal, grew up in the same Charlotte neighborhood as Chambers. She said she was very much a child of the Swann era, attending West Charlotte High School, which became a symbol of the district’s integration efforts in the 1970s and 1980s.

“I know I’m a product of the desegregation ruling,” she said. “That caused me to go from a segregated school at University Park, which was entirely Black, to then see desegregation because of the work of Julius Chambers.”

Naming process

Some board members said they wanted to review the renaming process after one speaker raised concerns about how the school’s alumni voices were not given sufficient representation during the public comments section of the board meeting.

In June, amid nationwide and local protests over the police killing of George Floyd in Minnesota, school board leaders said they would begin researching and renaming schools that were named after Confederate figures. Other school districts, colleges and governments in North Carolina already have removed names of Confederate or renowned racists from public buildings.

Vance, who served as a Confederate military captain and later senator and governor of North Carolina, owned slaves and continued to attempt to keep Black citizens from voting after the war.

In a survey of nearly 1,200 alumni, parents, faculty and others with connections to Vance High, Chambers was identified as the top choice among community members. The top choice among roughly 500 students was University City High School.

Board member Carol Sawyer said while she is pleased to support the renaming, she hopes the district would follow through with concrete action.

“My fervent hope is that our future decisions as a board will honor not just his name but his legacy in fighting for school integration,” she said.

This story was originally published October 13, 2020 at 9:27 PM.