Actress Julianne Moore Campaigns To Erase Confederate Name From Virginia High

Julianne Moore is lending her voice to a growing campaign to change the name of a Virginia high school that honors Confederate General J.E.B.

Moore and Hollywood producer Bruce Cohen have launched a Change.org petition to change the name of J.E.B. Stuart Excessive Faculty to be modified to honor civil rights chief and Supreme Courtroom Justice Thurgood Marshall. The petition, posted to Change.org, garnered almost 29,000 signatures by Monday afternoon.

The petition says “this school is attended by a diverse group of students who should not have to attend a school that bears the name of a man who fought to keep African Americans enslaved”.

A movement to change the name of a high school honoring Confederate Gen. J.E.B.

Many current students and alumni of J.E.B. “I feel the scholars of this faculty deserve higher than that moniker”. “The Confederate flag was at the center of our basketball court and on our athletic letter jackets and wasn’t removed until 2001 – but the symbol of Stuart on a horse waving a flag (now solid blue) remains”, they wrote. We also recognize that there are historic, legacy, and financial concerns in making changes in the names of schools. Moore attended Stuart from 1975 to 1977 before moving to Germany with her family, and Cohen graduated with the Stuart class of 1979.

“It’s something that embarrassingly none of us stopped to think, ‘How did our school get this name?'” Cohen said.

Moore and Cohen go on to argue that the school’s name represents a “history of racism”, exemplified by this past June’s Charleston church shooting, in which a confederate flag-wearing gunman killed nine African Americans.

Stuart Excessive Faculty, situated a few 30-minute drive from Washington, D.C., has one of the crucial racially numerous scholar our bodies in its county, with 49 % of scholars being Hispanic, 24 % white, 12 % Asian and 11 % black, reported the Washington Submit.

The producer said that he and Moore decided to lend their star power to the cause after hearing about students advocating for the change.

Moore and Cohen, who produced “American Beauty”, “Milk” and “Silver Linings Playbook”, were pals at the northern Virginia school in the late ’70s. “It was more like this embarrassing shrug”. Lawmakers in South Carolina eliminated the Accomplice flag from its statehouse grounds and a nationwide debate regarding symbols from the Confederacy has continued within the wake of the capturing.