Julianne Moore, producer Cohen seek change at high school named for

Julianne Moore has started a petition on Change.org to rename J.E.B. Stuart High School and others named for Confederate general Robert E. Lee and former schools superintendent W.T. Woodson.

“So we’re calling on the Fairfax County School Board to rename it Thurgood Marshall High School”.

The choice to use Stuart for the school’s name was widely seen as a not-so-veiled attack on that decision. Stuart, a name she finds “reprehensible”.

J.E.B Stuart’s school symbol is now an image of Stuart waving the Confederate flag atop a horse. We also recognize that there are historic, legacy, and financial concerns in making changes in the names of schools. It has garnered more than 25,000 signatures.

“We identify our buildings, monuments and parks after exalted and heroic people as a approach to honor them and encourage ourselves to do higher and attain for extra in our personal lives”, Moore stated in a press release to the Washington Submit. “Stuart High School student, I feel embarrassed to say I go to a school named after someone who wouldn’t support our diverse student body” a post on the petition from Anna Rowan said.

[Students seek name change at Stuart High School]. Almost half the school’s students – 49 percent – are Hispanic, while 24 percent are white, 14 percent are Asian and 11 percent are black. Six in 10 students at Stuart – the highest percentage in Fairfax – qualify for free or reduced-price meals, a federal measure of poverty.

Moore and Cohen suggested the school be renamed after Thurgood Marshall, the first African American Supreme Court Justice. Stuart in 1979. He and Moore have been friends since the eighth grade, they said.

“At the moment, this faculty is attended by a various group of scholars who shouldn’t need to attend a faculty that bears the identify of a person who fought to maintain African-People enslaved”, reads the petition from Moore and Cohen. A star of such films as “Boogie Nights”, “The End of the Affair” and the “Hunger Games” series, she won a Best Actress Oscar earlier this year for her role in “Still Alice”.

Moore was joined in the fight by another Hollywood heavyweight, producer Bruce Cohen.

It is not the first time the pair have united for social causes, having previously lent their names to campaigns supporting LGBT rights.

Cohen, who graduated in 1979, told the Post the he felt there was “real momentum” to make a change at the school. Lawmakers in South Carolina removed the Confederate flag from its statehouse grounds and a national debate concerning symbols from the Confederacy has continued in the wake of the shooting.