Mr. Lewis, the civil rights giant who died last week, beat out a list that included Barack Obama and Cesar Chavez to have the high school, in Fairfax County, named after him.<\/b>
\nA Virginia school district announced on Thursday that it would rename Robert E. Lee High School in Springfield for John Lewis, the Georgia congressman and civil rights giant who died last week. The name change, which is expected to go into effect in September, has been in the works for over a year and a half, according to Tamara Derenak Kaufax, a school board member. Mr. Lewis, who was called \u201cthe conscience of the Congress\u201d by his colleagues, had been on a short list of names since March that also included former President Barack Obama and Cesar Chavez, the farmworker organizer, she added. \u201cWe thought, \u2018Does the Confederacy represent who we are?\u2019\u201d Ms. Derenak Kaufax said. The school district, which is also named after Lee, a Confederate general, did not have policies and regulations in place for a name change, Ms. Derenak Kaufax said. The district also wanted to have a robust conversation about the possible new school name with the community and students, she said. Kimberly Boateng,17, last year\u2019s student body representative on the Fairfax County School Board, said she had rallied her class and lobbied her peers for the name change. \u201cInitially, the name didn\u2019t really affect me,\u201d said Ms. Boateng, who will be a senior this fall at the future John R. Lewis High School. \u201cMost people don\u2019t call it the Robert E. Lee School, we just called it Lee because it was embarrassing. We always had to explain that we aren\u2019t the name.\u201d The board\u2019s new student representative, Nathan Onibudo,17, said that he was happy the long process of renaming the school was finally over and that he could be proud of the man his school is named after. \u201cThe name on the school building is something each student had to walk under, and you want that name to be someone they can aspire to be,\u201d Mr. Onibudo said. \u201cThat person should be someone that a student can embody.\u201d Mr. Lewis\u2019s lifetime of activism began when he was a student, demonstrating against voter disenfranchisement and Jim Crow laws. At 21, Mr. Lewis was one of the original 13 Freedom Riders who traveled across the South to protest segregation. When he was 23, Mr. Lewis was the sixth person to speak at the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his landmark \u201cI Have A Dream\u201d speech. Mr. Lewis, a Democrat, was elected to Congress in 1986 and represented Georgia\u2019s Fifth District until his death on July 17. Ms. Derenak Kaufax said she felt that Mr. Lewis\u2019s legacy aligned much more closely with the school\u2019s values than Lee\u2019s did. She called Mr. Lewis an icon for starting \u201cgood trouble\u201d and for making people understand his ideas in such a way that they could eventually come together. That was a legacy that the school needed and wanted, she said. \u201cI wanted a name where everybody who walked through those doors felt safe and supported,\u201d Ms. Derenak Kaufax added, pointing to the diversity of the school, which is about 85 percent nonwhite. \u201cI really believe that a school has to make the students and staff feel comfortable and the community proud, and none of those things existed with the name Robert E. Lee.\u201d Ms. Boateng said she had been eager to graduate next June but for now is more looking forward to simply walking into her school again. She has imagined returning to school and seeing Mr. Lewis\u2019s name on the front of the building. \u201cThe feeling of knowing I go to John R. Lewis High is amazing,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n