Phil Varner is not a historian, nor does he claim to be one.
But, when the software engineer began researching the namesakes of Charlottesville’s public schools about six years ago “for my curiosity,” in his own words, the subsequent articles he published on his website “Correcting the Narrative” were considered “historical resources and information” by the Charlottesville City School Board.
“I’m trying to paint a picture and tell a story with that information. I’m not trying to write a professional historical analysis,” Varner told The Daily Progress, adding that he has no formal historical training or background. “I was actually expecting the school system to do more background research, not just use this.”
His 56-page dossier became the primary source of information the school board relied upon to guide its investigation into the people behind the names of its schools. To date, that review has led to changing the names of four elementary schools and one middle school in the city.
One of the elementary schools to face school board scrutiny was Burnley-Moran. Though its namesakes — Carrie Burnley and Sarepta Moran — hail from the early 1900s, their descendants are still very much alive, and some still live in the community. Those that do say they are frustrated by how the school district has treated their families and family names.
“Those documents are just laced with opinion bias, just gross negligence, and none of its lives up to the standards of the American Historical Association,” Chuck Moran told The Daily Progress. “This guy got away with writing that, submitted the documents to the city schools and they took them as verbatim, as truth, and put them out there.”
Chuck Moran is the great-nephew of Sarepta Moran, a longtime educator in city schools and the first principal of what was then Venable Elementary School, now Trailblazer, for 21 years. In 1954, she, alongside fellow educator Carrie Burnley, were honored for their collective 98 years of service shaping the minds of Charlottesville’s youth with their names on the school division’s newest elementary school.
Seventy years later, their names are slated to come down. In January 2023, the Charlottesville School Board declared the namesakes of Burnley-Moran “served Charlottesville’s racially segregated white schools,” a declaration primarily based on Varner’s discovery that the two women were members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
It was their involvement with the latter organization in particular that led Varner to surmise that both women must have been proponents of the racist theories that such hereditary organizations historically propagated, especially in their roles as instructors.
“I think the school system just decided that they didn’t really actually need any more information about it, because this information was sufficient enough to enable people to make decisions on whether or not this was true,” said Varner.
Chuck Moran believes the decision was evidence of a lack of “care” as opposed to a well-informed conclusion.
“They have an agenda,” said Moran of the school board. “What they’re doing is standing behind this agenda, putting out these faulty documents and leading people to these conclusions that these were awful people.”
While the school division is adamant that the decision to change the name of Burnley-Moran cannot be reversed, recent developments show that such decisions are not, unlike the names, set in stone. Earlier this year, Shenandoah County Public Schools changed course and reverted two of its schools back to their original names honoring Confederates. And Charlottesville City Schools changed the name of Buford Middle School to Charlottesville Middle School last summer after announcing plans to pause name changes “because there were questions about whether that we really had brought all the best options to the table.”
City schools spokeswoman Beth Cheuk told The Daily Progress the school division did not consider recruiting a trained historian or formal historical agency to conduct an outside review of the school names. Instead the board relied on community members, such as Varner, to accumulate and submit their own materials. Despite referring to other community members, Varner’s is the only research publicized on the division’s website.
“We would be foolish to set aside the work that someone has gathered, pulling together original sources,” said Cheuk, adding that the school division owes Varner “a great, big shoutout.”
Others in the community have questioned the division’s decision not to establish a more formal review of the school names. They wonder why the public has not been provided more holistic, objective research on each of the namesakes before decisions about names were made.
Varner’s dossier includes information on only eight of the 11 school namesakes. He said he refrained from diving into the personal lives of Nannie Cox Jackson, Alicia Inez Bowler Lugo and Rebecca Fuller McGinness because of their race. Jackson, Lugo and McGinness were all Black women, he said, and “this author is not the right person for that important job.”
“I, as a White man, don’t need to be telling the stories of Black women. I think there are other historians, writers, who can do that better,” said Varner.
Although Varner is a man, he did feel comfortable telling the story of Burnley and Moran, despite their gender.
During both of their tenures in the Charlottesville education system in the first half of the 20th century, teachers were under orders to teach a “state-mandated White supremacist curriculum,” said Varner. His article on Moran also points out that she held a “uniquely effective role” as UDC members were known to push for rewriting history textbooks to include the “Lost Cause” myth, which asserts that Confederate soldiers were not explicitly fighting to preserve slavery — despite Confederate leaders making that point abundantly clear in speeches and essays.
Moran and others have argued that membership in such an organization does not mean an adoption of all of that organization’s credos, akin to supporting the Salvation Army in spite of its history of homophobia or belonging to a CrossFit gym despite its founder’s “rabid libertarian” ideology.
“Now, we don’t know whether they believed in it or not, right? That’s the argument,” said Varner. “Maybe they didn’t actually believe in that. In all likelihood, they did, because that was the most common belief among White people, especially White people of their social status. That’s the most likely scenario; we don’t have any evidence to the contrary. That’s sufficient for me that they did take these actions.”
Varner’s findings and further community discourse also seemed to be sufficient for 61% of the respondents to a school division survey, released last January, who said they were in favor of changing the name of Burnley-Moran.
After combing through original documents online and from the University of Virginia Special Collections Library, Varner said there isn’t a word he wrote “that doesn’t have evidence behind it.”
Chuck Moran would like to see more of that evidence. He is of the mind that taking the leap to assume all members of the United Daughters of the Confederacy must have been advocates of the Lost Cause, segregation and blatant racism is too big of a jump to make safely.
“I want to see the facts. Show me where she contributed in any way to any of those things,” said Moran. “He basically blames her for being involved with the rewriting of the school textbooks, which did happen and the UDC was involved with it. Was my great-aunt part of that? I don’t know. Neither does he, he admits he doesn’t.”
Ever since Chuck Moran and his sister, Ginger, caught wind of the school board’s investigation into their family name, they began conducting their own investigation. Their great-grandfather, Isaac K. Moran, enlisted in the Confederate Army in 1864 to fight in Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He lost his left leg after a battle wound and eventually worked as a bursar for UVa after the war.
Her father’s service made Sarepta Moran eligible to join the UDC, which she did in 1906, a move that her great-nephew interprets as an attempt to make her father happy or establish social connections. Moran said he reached out to the UDC to inquire about his great-aunt’s activities as a member of the group. No reference of Sarepta Moran surfaced in the national organization’s archives aside from her membership application.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Moran, recalling his reaction to hearing the board’s decision. “I just couldn’t believe it, because that was not the woman that I knew. [By the time I heard] they were pretty much well decided that they were going to scrub her name off of Burnley-Moran Elementary for which she was named.”
Though she died from a heart attack when he was 12 years old, Moran recalled many fond memories of his great-aunt, whom he and his sisters considered more like a grandmother. Ever the teacher, she taught him how to whittle and bequeathed him a Boy Scout knife once he was able to carve an object without harming himself.
“I had a great fondness for her as a person and as a relative,” he said. “She was an educator’s educator. She was always playful, always imaginative.”
The question, for Varner, is less about whether such individuals were “good people” and more about whether their “actions represent the values of our current school system.” Their involvement with the UDC, to him, indicates no.
“People always want to leave room for alternative explanations as to why their ancestors did certain things instead of just accepting what the most common explanation is,” said Varner, who added it’s “a stretch” to refer to the UDC as simply a social club for women. “We can have nuanced and complicated views of our ancestors; we don’t have to only look at them in simplistic terms.”
More than four years into the process of assessing school names, the Charlottesville School Board this May laid out a procedure to review and come to a decision on the namesakes. That included an advisory committee formed of members of the school and greater community as well as a step to notify relatives of the namesakes, giving them 30 days to express their opinions.
Despite the creation of a more established, deliberate process, it will only be applied as the division moves forward to review Jackson-Via and Greenbrier elementary schools and Lugo-McGinness Academy. The procedure says that, for Burnley-Moran and Johnson, the committee will begin with selecting the new names.
It is the more thorough process and treatment Chuck Moran wished his great-aunt’s legacy had also received. He’s not opposed to changing school names — he has not argued against changing the names of schools named after actual Confederate military men or vocal supporters of segregation — as long as it’s a well-informed consensus from the entire community that examines the “entirety of somebody’s life.”
“That seems like a really fair process, because find me somebody out here that has no skeletons in their closet,” he said.
“It’s not too late to get it right and do it well,” Moran continued. “Come up with a process that can be shared with the rest of the country, because if it really did start here, then we have an obligation to get it right and to share that information of how the process can benefit other people who are considering this, but in a fair, factual, inclusive and transparent manner.”
Source: www.dailyprogress.com
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