Alexandria lawmakers will vote this month on renaming four streets that reflect the city’s Confederate past — capping off the first iteration of an annual process that is meant to gradually rid the Northern Virginia city of these Lost Cause symbols.
The plan, finalized on Tuesday night, would change the name of three streets that honor Confederate military officials and “rededicate” one more street that would keep its existing name but receive a new eponym.
At least 41 streets in Alexandria are associated with Confederate military officials, and city leaders and residents have since at least 2015 openly questioned whether those belong in this history-filled city. But only one street — what was once Jefferson Davis Highway and is now Richmond Highway — has actually undergone a name change since then.
Advertisement
Pending a Jan. 20 vote from the Alexandria City Council, the plan would rename North Breckinridge Place after Harriet Jacobs, an African American abolitionist who founded Alexandria’s first school for free Black children.
North and South Early Streets would receive an extra “e” to honor Lt. Col. Charity Earley, the U.S. Army’s highest-ranking Black woman officer during World War II. Forrest Street would drop an “r” to become Forest Street, after the geographical feature.
North and South Jordan Streets and Jordan Court would be rededicated to honor Thomasina E. Jordan, an Alexandria resident who was also known as Red Hawk Woman and became the first Native American to serve in the U.S. electoral college.
“The next generations of kids of any color or background will understand that the city changed these names to have a totally separate meaning from the historical figures they were named after,” council member John T. Chapman (D) said at Tuesday night’s meeting.
Advertisement
Chapman, who chaired a council subcommittee on the renaming effort, said he wanted the plan to include different types of streets, from a one-block commercial strip to a much longer residential road.
The same variety was important, he added, when considering how these streets would be renamed — especially given that some property owners have expressed concerns about the costly process of changing their deeds and addresses.
The council’s effort “is not just hard and fast only renaming things, but also looking at opportunities for rededicating street names,” he said in an interview earlier this week. “I do think there is a place for that.”
While Alexandria includes plenty of Civil War iconography, most of the city’s Confederate streets did not receive their names until many decades after the war. In the early 1950s, city lawmakers voted to name all new north-south streets after Confederate military officials.
Advertisement
That is how three of the streets up for a vote received their current names, according to city research. All had different names before being annexed into Alexandria but were renamed after brigadiers-general in the Confederate Army: Jubal A. Early, Thomas Jordan and John Cabell Breckinridge, who had also served as vice president under James Buchanan.
Forrest Street, which received its current name in a 1941 remapping, is believed to honor either Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest or French Forrest, a Confederate navy commander who built the CSS ironclad Virginia.
But little concrete action was taken to change these names, even after the rule on new streets was removed from city code in 2014. It was only after local and national demonstrations for racial justice in 2020 that lawmakers pushed harder to strike their names from the map.
Advertisement
City lawmakers launched a program three years ago to make it easier to rename streets by a petition, but — even though some local activists tried going door to door to collect signatures — no attempt drew enough support to reach the council.
Last year, Mayor Justin M. Wilson (D) led a push to rename a handful of streets as part of the city’s budget process, setting up a process that will culminate in the Jan. 20 vote and then repeat itself every year.
Under direction from the council, an Alexandria city commission drafted a list of people and places considered to be “worthy of honor” — ranging from Joseph McCoy and Benjamin Thomas, two Black teenagers who were lynched in Alexandria in the late 19th century, to former U.S. senator John McCain, who lived in the city while serving in Congress.
The subcommittee led by Chapman selected six streets to potentially be renamed this year and narrowed that down to a smaller, more targeted selection that the city council further refined on Tuesday.
Advertisement
Still, the Jan. 20 vote is likely to face some opposition. Some residents surveyed by the city have said changing the names is an unnecessary burden, and four people who live on Early Street wrote to lawmakers asking them not to change a name they associated with the time of day rather than a Confederate official.
“This neighborhood history [and] all of these memories are with and of our family and friends on North Early Street,” one wrote. “They are not tied to some long forgotten namesake.”
But council member Canek Aguirre (D) suggested that preserving any Confederate street names — or even rededicating them — loses sight of the message that those names convey to the city’s Black residents.
“It’s a symbol that basically says, ‘Know your place,’ ” he said during Tuesday’s meeting. “While it might be inconvenient to some, we need to consider the larger meaning of why we’re doing this.”
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLGkecydZK%2BZX2d9c4COaWhoaWFkrq2x15qlnaqZlnqku82fnJ2dopbBpnnSramenaSoerOxzZqkoqaXYrCwwc2coKVlpqTBpns%3D