Editorial

“I think they realized this was the one chance they would have for the next 20 years or more to make a real difference,” a beaming former Fairfax County NAACP chair Victor Dunbar commented in the lobby of the Falls Church School Board's chambers Tuesday, after the board voted 4-3 to name its new middle school after the Falls Church area's preeminent woman African American educator and community activist Mary Ellen Henderson.

It was a stunning development, and one that will well serve the Falls Church community and students of the middle school for many years to come. The choice came down to Ms. Henderson and her contemporary, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt. It is ironic that the lives of both were chronologically parallel. But while Ms. Roosevelt's accomplishments on the world arena, especially her authorship of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as a champion for justice and for racial and sexual equality, were magnified by her social rank, Ms. Henderson worked in the trenches as a Falls Church educator and principal of the James Lee School for many years before integration finally came to the schools of Northern Virginia in the late 1950s.

She championed the interwoven causes of social justice and education since she moved to Falls Church in 1911 and took her first teaching post at the two-room “Falls Church Colored School” in 1917. Her strong personality shaped the consciousness of the entire community she influenced through her role an educational and community leader here for decades. Many still remember the brave and resolute “Miss Nellie” well into her later years until her death in 1976.

After a list of 27 original names was honed to six by a School Board-appointed “Naming Committee,” the Board wound up nominating only three of the final six names Tuesday. Two were women, and they combined for six of the first seven votes. In a second run-off vote, between two exemplary women, the African American one prevailed, and we can say in this editorial space without hesitation that the entire Falls Church community can be enormously proud.

Everyone on the School Board wanted the new middle school to be named for an exemplary role model, someone students would study closely and exemplify. This, in itself, was a noble sentiment shared by all board members. Too bad that such a grand, shining figure as Eleanor Roosevelt had to be passed over in this case, but the result should do nothing to diminish her in the eyes of this community. Indeed, the record of Tuesday’s close vote should be a new local legacy, inspiring many to model themselves on her life. But to embrace Ms. Henderson now as part of Falls Church's living and breathing on-going community, the way the School Board did Tuesday, is a magnificent, earthshaking, paradigm-altering move.