I grew up in the neighborhood behind Freeman High School. My two sisters and I all graduated from DSF in the 1980s. Being raised by parents who were both native Richmonders, we were a family of unapologetic blue-and-gray rebels. We could walk to home football games on Friday nights and hear from our back yard the marching band practice on Saturday mornings. We were all proud cross-country and long-distance track runners. Back then, people had a connection to the history and community of Freeman - a school founded about the same time as the house in which my sisters and I grew up was built.

Since most of us and our families hailed from Richmond, or at least somewhere in the Old Dominion, we embraced that our beloved high school was named after Southern historian Douglas Southall Freeman, who won Pulitzer prizes for biographies on two of Virginia's finest native sons, Robert E. Lee and George Washington. We understood that that was why our yearbook was called "The Historian." That was why we were called "the Rebels." That was why we waived Confederate Battle Flags and wore Confederate booster buttons, and sang "Dixie" at sporting events. And that was why our mascot was a burly Confederate-clad soldier called "Rebel Man." We knew that Freeman wrote about brave and noble American soldiers, generals, and statesmen, and that that proud Southern spirit defined our middle-class community, both black and white, in a positive and fruitful way.

But now, Rebel Man is gone. The flag is gone. Dixie is gone. And I understand that even the mascot name "Rebels" is being challenged as "racist and divisive" by a student in your activist, er, I mean, "leadership" center. Does he, the student body and their parents, the administration, and the school board not grasp the fact that DSF was a rebel? By today's ill-informed and miseducated standards, Freeman is pejoratively called a "lost cause" historian, meaning that he actually believed in the cause for states' rights and stood against central authority. That's just the heritage of Virginia and her cavalier people, y'all. Like it or lump it.

So, taking my cue from both my alma mater's namesake and the school's current "Never be bullied into silence" campaign, I am petitioning that the "Freeman" name be removed from my high school. If the students, administrators, and community at large cannot respect the value of this amazing writer's historical works, the fact that he regularly saluted the Lee statue on Monument Avenue when driving to his longtime job as editor of the Richmond News Leader, and his love for being "deeply rooted in the soil of old Virginia," well, I don't think y'all deserve the honorable name of Douglas Southall Freeman. How about Quisling High or the Reconstructed School? Those might be more fitting in these topsy-turvy times that try men's souls.