Alexandria City Public Schools voted unanimously Monday to change the names of T.C. Williams High School and Matthew Maury Elementary School, named for a segregationist and a Confederate leader, respectively.

T.C. Williams was named for the former ACPS superintendent Thomas Chambliss Williams, who tried to obstruct federal efforts to integrate schools even after Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in 1954. Today the high school that bears his name educates about 4,000 students speaking 120 languages from 121 countries, said Helen Lloyd, director of the ACPS office of communications.

Roughly 400 students attend Matthew Maury Elementary School, Lloyd said. Maury was an oceanographer and a member of the Confederate army. During the Civil War, he experimented with underwater torpedoes and supervised the creation of torpedo defenses. After the war, he moved to Mexico and tried to convince fellow Confederates to follow him to form a “new Virginia” that continued the enslavement of  “non-white labor.”

Board member Heather Thornton noted during the meeting Monday that a statue honoring Maury in Richmond was removed this summer. She recalled seeing the statue regularly as a student at University of Richmond.

“I can’t tell you how many times we would drive down that road and just shake our heads at the fact that these are the individuals of history that, as a society, we are choosing to honor,” Thornton said.

Board member Christopher Suarez also voiced his support for the name changes, but added that “there’s a lot of systemic work that is going to need to be done going forward.” Vice Chair Veronica Nolan echoed that sentiment.

“While [renaming the schools is] the right thing to do, we do want to make sure that we don’t feel like we’re high-fiving each other and the work’s been completed, because there’s much to be done,” Nolan said.

Monday’s vote is a culmination of months of conversation and educational programs. In September ACPS launched The Identity Project aimed at examining both mens’ legacies.

In a video created by the project, Deborah Bradby-Lytle recalled her experience as one of the first students to integrate Alexandria schools in 1959.

“That school should not be named T.C. Williams,” she said. “He was a known racist.”

T.C. Williams High School was at the center of the Denzel Washington film Remember the Titans, released in 2000. It depicted the high school’s football team, which in 1971 formed an integrated team and went on to win a state championship.

Earl Cook, former Alexandria Police Chief and a ’71 Titan, endorsed the name change.

“There was a presumption that the school board and the city fathers who said this name is ok, that it’s been vetted so that it’s ok,” Cook said in the Identity Project video. “Nobody talked about the dark side of that person.”

ACPS Superintendent of Schools Dr. Gregory C. Hutchings, Jr. called the vote a “historic” moment Monday night, and noted the impact of those education efforts, saying that “if we asked people back in June what they knew about Thomas Chambliss Williams or what they knew about Matthew Maury, many people wouldn’t have a response.”

He went on, “But I can tell you today, especially with our young people, they do know specifically who these individuals were and why these names should not be plastered on our schools.”

Schools across the D.C. region are reckoning with their names, a trend that escalated following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

In June, Prince William County renamed two schools that honored Confederate General Stonewall Jackson.

More than 22,000 people have signed a petition to rename D.C.’s Woodrow Wilson High School because the 28th U.S. president implemented segregation within the federal government. In October the D.C. Council approved unanimously a resolution to support the renaming.

The decision in Alexandria allows the superintendent to seek community input and nominations on recommendations for new names to be approved by the board. Those names would take effect at the start of the 2021-22 school year.