Colonel Zadok Magruder High School in Derwood has been a fixture of the Montgomery County Public School System since its opening in 1970. Alumni include actors, comedians, singers, Olympians and professional athletes. Another aspect of its history is something community members have become less proud of and are taking steps to change – its name.
Magruder was named after an enslaver, who according to the 1790 Census, enslaved 26 people and also played a key role in the formation of the state of Maryland and is considered to be one of the founding fathers of the county. The Magruder community is taking steps to get the school, one of seven named after enslavers per a recent report from Montgomery History, renamed.
Magruder High School, along with MCPS, will hold its first community meeting Thursday at 6:30 p.m. to discuss and gather input from the school community about renaming. Those who wish to participate can register for the meeting at this link.
In February, a petition to rename the school was submitted to the Board of Education, sparking the beginning of a process that will ask the Magruder school community to confront the county’s history of slavery and gage their interest in renaming.
Frances Frost, the assistant to the Associate Superintendent of the Office of School Support and Wellbeing, told MoCo360 that the dialogues are intended to be respectful places for community members to feel that their opinions have been heard.
“We really are encouraging people in the Magruder community to come out and have their voices heard wherever they may fit on the issue,” Frost said. “Or even if they’re not sure and they just want to learn about the process, they just want to learn about Magruder, we encourage them to come out because we do want all community members to feel like they’re aware of what this conversation is and what the decisions may be, that will impact them.”
According to Frost, when the board receives a petition to rename a school, they oversee whether there is reason enough for the petition to move forward to the community engagement portion of the renaming process – which is where Magruder High School is in the process.
There is no signature requirement for the petition, Frost said, but the petition must be signed by people who are part of the school community, such as students, teachers, school administrator, parents, guardians, alumni and people in cluster schools that feed students to the high school.
“The main purpose of the dialogue is to understand the community members connection to the name of the school, and their feeling of, ‘Does this name reflect the values of the school?’ So, we’re not really asking, what do they think a new name should be,” she said.
This is the first time the school district has gone through this process, according to Frost, since MCPS’ renaming policy was revised in June 2022. The timeline of the events is not set in stone.
The last time a school was renamed was in 2021, when Col. E Brooke Lee Middle School in Silver Spring was renamed to Odessa Shannon Middle School. The school was renamed in the wake of the killing of George Floyd. According to Montgomery History’s report, Lee was a powerful political figure and developer of Silver Spring in the 1920s who included restrictive covenants in residential properties that he built and sold. The covenants “prevented Blacks, Jews and others from purchasing the homes – and solidifying segregated patterns in the county’s housing for decades,” the report states.
Shannon was elected to the Board of Education in 1982 and served until 1984. She was the executive director of the Montgomery County Human Rights Commission and founder of the county’s Human Rights Hall of Fame, as MoCo360 reported at the time of the school’s renaming.
Kim Glassman, the Magruder PTSA president, said the association was not involved in the petition to rename the school and was started by a community member. She said that after the next upcoming community forums a report from all the meetings will be compiled and submitted to the board for review.
According to an MCPS 2022-2023 student enrollment breakdown of Magruder, Hispanic and Latino students make up 42.2% of the student population, 21.2% of students are white, 18.7% are Black or African American, 13% are Asian, less than 5% are American Indian or Alaskan Native, less than 5% are Pacific Islander and less than 5% are two or more races.
MCPS hopes to have the report submitted to the board before the winter holiday, Frost said.
Glassman echoed Frost’s hope for wide participation from community members. “The only way that the school district will know what to do next is if we have communication and participation from as much of the community as possible,” she said. “So really, for me, the most important part is the participation because I think we need to know what the community as a whole, like where people want things to go, what opinions people have and all of that.”
There will be more opportunities for community engagement to come. Fliers about the petition and community dialogue process are available in English and Spanish.
The next in-person sessions will be held at 6:30 p.m. on Oct. 25 at Shady Grove Middle School, and at 6:30 p.m. on Nov. 2 at Flower Hill Elementary School, which are both feeder schools of Magruder High School.
There will be two more virtual sessions via Zoom from 10 to 11 a.m. on Oct. 21, and from noon to 1 p.m. on Oct. 27. Registration is available at this Google Form.
Schools named after enslavers
The report from Montgomery History, “In Slavery’s Shadow: Surveying Montgomery County Public School Names,” written by Ralph Buglass, Rockville resident and MCPS graduate, outlines the history behind MCPS school naming and renaming process and digs into the namesake of each of the seven MCPS schools named after enslaves.
The other schools are Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Richard Montgomery High School in Rockville, Thomas S. Wootton High School in Rockville, Francis Scott Key Middle School in Silver Spring, John Poole Middle School in Poolesville and Julius West Middle School in Rockville.
Montgomery History’s goal is not to hold a position on possible renamings, but to “present the historical record as clearly as possible in the interest of greater public awareness and understanding,” the report said.
Buglass, a volunteer researcher for Montgomery History, said that his work built on the reporting of student journalists at Watkins Mill High School who reported in 2018 that three MCPS high schools were named after enslavers, including the county’s namesake Richard Montgomery.
“So, there was some concern beginning with that article, and then the thinking that it might be an issue that comes before the school board, eventually the administration wanted to have some background research done,” he said.
Buglass said he spent almost a year scouring U.S. census records and data not just in Maryland but other states as well.
One of the most surprising parts of his research, Buglass said, was learning that there was a stronger connection between slavery and Montgomery Blair. According to the report, Blair has a “complex, even contradictory legacy” because he had argued for the freedom of an enslaved man in the U.S. Supreme Court case Dred Scott v. Sandford, but strongly opposed equal rights for Blacks after the Civil War.
Buglass said that through looking at census records in Missouri, where the Blair family lived before moving to their country estate – which was called Silver Spring at the time – he found that Blair was listed as enslaving one person in 1850.
To share more about the county and school district’s ties to slavery, Montgomery History will be holding a conference on Nov. 4 in partnership with Montgomery College where Buglass will present his research. The conference will be in-person at the college’s Rockville campus.
Buglass said he hopes county residents can take away from his research that slavery played a bigger role in the county’s history than is might be generally perceived. He added that at one point, 42% of the county’s residents were enslaved.
“History does matter,” he said. “It’s a legacy that we still live with today.”