New names for Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis high schools narrowed down. Here's the short list.

Editor's Note: This story has been updated with the correct spelling of Lanier's first name, McMillians's last name and to clarify the naming conventions

The month after the Robert E. Lee statue was torn down in front of its namesake high school in Montgomery during widespread protests of police brutality in the death of George Floyd, Montgomery's school board voted to change the names of three high schools: Jefferson Davis High School, Robert E. Lee High School and Sidney Lanier High School.

This week, a renaming committee submitted its short-list of new names to the board during a work session. The original list of 9,000 public submissions now stands at five names under consideration for Lee High and four for Jefferson Davis.

(A recent board decision to merge Lanier with G. W. Carver High School precludes the need to rename that school, board leaders said.) 

The first culling of the list was perhaps the most obvious: Rabbi Scott Looper said many of the submitted 9,000 names were duplicates, anti-Semitic or racist. In a subcommittee, the list was narrowed down to around 60 names for each school.

The Renaming Committee worked with Montgomery School Board guidelines and naming conventions, such as they could consider names for a geographic or historic area that the school serves, or consider names that honor positive figures. School board policy prevents naming schools after living figures.

The committee culled the list further with two voting rounds. The first left them with about 10 names for each school. They had intended to have a list of three names for each school after the second round, but ties emerged.

Robert E. Lee High School

For Robert E. Lee High School, Dr. John Winston was the top name. After Winston, there was a four-way tie between Henry Spears, Inez Baskin, Percy Julian and Northside.

According to an obituary published in the Montgomery Advertiser, Dr. John Winston provided aid and health care to those injured on the Selma-to-Montgomery march in 1965. He co-founded the Pryor-Winston Medical Center, which provided healthcare to West Montgomery.

Henry Spears was the longest-serving member of the Montgomery School Board as well as the first Black chairman of the board, according to a 2009 news obituary in the Montgomery Advertiser. 

Inez Baskin was a Black journalist who documented the Montgomery Bus Boycott for Jet Magazine, a Black-owned national publication, and, by extension, the American Negro Press, a national news source for Black communities. She later covered the Black community for the Advertiser.

More:Inez Baskin, a Black female journalist, broke barriers reporting on Montgomery Bus Boycott

Percy Julian was a chemist born in Montgomery before going on to attend DePauw University and be the first to synthesize the drug physostigmine, which made it readily available to treat glaucoma, according to the American Chemical Society.

Jefferson Davis High School

For Jefferson Davis High School, Carter Hill was the top name. Victor Tulane, Jo Ann Robinson and Southside followed in a three-way tie.

Jefferson Davis is on Carter Hill Road.

Victor Tulane was a prominent Black businessman who built the Tulane building at Ripley and High streets as a grocery store in the early 1900s, according to an application for historic status with the National Parks Service. The store was an important establishment to the Black community.

Jo Ann Robinson was a Black Alabama State University English professor who organized the Montgomery Bus Boycott as president of the Women's Political Council, and later working behind the scenes at the Montgomery Improvement Association.

Looper said students submitted the geographic names of Southside, Northside and Carter Hill.

Sidney Lanier High School fell off the list of schools to be renamed in part because the board decided it would merge the school with G. W. Carver High School, said School Board President Clare Weil.

The Sidney Lanier High School Alumni Association had opposed the renaming of the school. They had felt that Sidney Lanier, a poet, was inappropriately grouped in with Jefferson Davis and Robert. E. Lee.

More:As a committee narrows list of potential new high school names, Lanier alumni resist change

Marlin McMillians, the president of the association, has explained that the school was named for Lanier's time as a poet, not ties to the Confederacy. 

The renaming process went on longer than expected. The committee had hoped to finish its work last summer, but Looper said the ongoing pandemic, student turnover on the committee because of graduations, and the eventual decision to close Lanier all added to the delays.

The Lanier student member remained a member-at-large after that school was dropped from the renaming list, Looper said. But the names submitted for Lanier's rebranding were removed from overall consideration. 

In its Whose Heritage spreadsheet, the Southern Poverty Law Center reports that more than 200 schools in the country are named for the Confederacy. The spreadsheet lists 24 schools for Alabama — not counting Montgomery because of their decision to change the names. Alabama is second only to Georgia and Texas in the number of schools with Confederate-related names.

As of June 2021, around $55,000 dollars had been raised to support the financial burden of changing the names. The Monument Preservation Act, passed in 2017, prohibits local governments from renaming schools that got their names more than four decades ago, among other limitations. (Fines can be levied in cases where names are removed.)

The final names must be voted on by the school board. Weil said that she thinks the School Board will discuss the names and will vote at the April meeting.

Jemma Stephenson is the children and education reporter for the Montgomery Advertiser. She can be reached at jstephenson@gannett.com or 334-261-1569. Krista Johnson contributed to this report.