Local Things Named for Appalling People: T.C. Williams High School
WRITTEN BY ANDREW BEAUJON | PUBLISHED ON JUNE 10, 2020

First in an occasional series of posts about Washington-area namesakes

In 1962, the Alexandria school board announced it had found the perfect namesake for the new high school it was building: Its superintendent, Thomas Chambliss Williams. Williams, the Washington Post reported, said he “felt honored but wished the school had been named for someone else.”

Many Alexandria residents feel the same today.

Williams was an avowed segregationist who did more than many people to hold back integration of the city’s schools. He was aided greatly in this pursuit by the Commonwealth of Virginia, whose program of “massive resistance” to integration after the 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education meant Governor Thomas Stanley would close any school that voluntarily desegregated. Students who wanted to move from underfunded and inadequate black schools had to apply individually. Those applications often landed on Williams’s desk, and he was only too eager to deny them. That state of affairs went unchallenged until 1958, when 14 students sued in federal court asking to overturn Williams’s rejections. The superintendent even fired Blois O. Hundley, a cook at Lyles Crouch School, because she joined the suit after two of her children applied to George Washington High School. (Under pressure from the Justice Department, he reinstated her a month later.)

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