A New Jersey school district is changing the name of Woodrow Wilson High School because of the previous president’s “racist values.”
The Camden City School District changed high school’s name during Tuesday’s school board meeting, as per NJ.com.
The change will be true when the 2022-2023 school year starts, and the school will be named “Eastside High School.”
A few community members had raised worries about the school being named after Wilson, a mid twentieth century Democrat who “expressed and demonstrated racist values,” district Superintendent Katrina McCombs told the media source.
“The renaming of Woodrow Wilson High School has obviously shown every one of us to never surrender and to keep on pushing forward until change occurs. … Again, I need to say thank you to the advisory group, to the initiative of the board of trustees and to our understudies for practicing their voices too,” McCombs said at Tuesday’s meeting, as per the report.
The name choices were picked by a 10-person committee which then, at that point, presented its decision to an open survey, which was decided on by in excess of 200 students.
During the renaming system, which started in 2020, different choices for renaming the school included previous U.S. Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and previous President Barack Obama.
In June 2020, Princeton University announced that Woodrow Wilson’s name would be eliminated from its public policy school and a residential college because of his “racist thinking.”
“The legal administrators presume that Woodrow Wilson’s racist reasoning and arrangements make him an unseemly namesake for a school or school whose researchers, students, and graduated class should immovably remain against prejudice in the entirety of its structures,” an assertion from the university’s president read.
The trustees cited Wilson’s “segregationist approaches,” where he isolated different federal agencies.
Wilson hindered a Japanese proposition which would have included racial equity as an establishing guideline to the League of Nations, news revealed.
Wilson, who died in 1924 at age 67, served in the White House from March 1913 to March 1921. The Virginia-born Wilson was previously the 34th governor of New Jersey and the 13th president of Princeton University. He was also the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919.