Edna Burke Jackson

Edna Burke Jackson (January 25, 1911 – February 21, 2004) was an American educator and writer, the first African American woman to teach at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington, D.C. As part of a campaign to rename the school that culminated in 2020, advocates pushed for it to be named Edna B. Jackson High School in her honor.
Biography.
Edna Burke Jackson was born in 1911 in Washington, D.C. She was the oldest of four children. Jackson excelled academically from a young age. She graduated as valedictorian from Dunbar High School, a prestigious public high school for African American students, where she had served as editor in chief of the student newspaper, in 1928. 
She studied Romance languages, particularly French, and social studies at Howard University on a four-year scholarship, which she won through placing second in an Elks Oratorical Contest. After three years at Howard, she graduated early and was invited by the civil rights activist and educator Mary McLeod Bethune to teach at her institution in Florida, now Bethune–Cookman University. Jackson declined, however, and stayed at Howard to obtain a master's degree in education. Later in her career, she would continue her education during the summers at Howard, Catholic University, and Cornell University.
When she was not able to find work as a teacher in Washington, she moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1934 to work at Booker T. Washington High School. There, she founded and led the school's Language Department.
After six years in Tulsa, she returned to Washington to become a teacher at Cardozo High School, where she worked from 1940 to 1954. Then, she and chemistry teacher Archie Lucas were hired as the first Black teachers at the high-ranking, all-white Woodrow Wilson High School. While the six other public high schools in the District of Columbia desegregated in 1954, Wilson remained all-white until September 1955. In her early years at Wilson, her white colleagues refused to sit with her at lunch and would use the n-word around her.
Jackson worked there for over two decades, teaching European and world history, until retiring in 1976. At Wilson, she advocated for further integration and for the incorporation of Black studies courses into the school's curriculum.
In addition to teaching, Jackson was a writer, first publishing a weekly column in a prominent Black newspaper, the Oklahoma Eagle, while living in Tulsa in the 1930s. From 1959 to 1970 she wrote book reviews for the "Journal of Negro History." She was also deeply involved in volunteer work with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, among other organizations.
She died in 2004 at age 93.
High school renaming campaign.
Today, the formerly segregated Wilson High School is the district's most diverse public high school. Advocates had long pushed for the school to be renamed, as its namesake, President Woodrow Wilson, was an avowed segregationist. In 2020, as the Black Lives Matter movement drove a national conversation around renaming monuments and buildings, the district government acquiesced, agreeing to change the school's name.
Among the list of names for a possible renaming, some advocates began coalescing around Edna B. Jackson High School, which had been suggested various times in the past, in honor of her role as a trailblazing Black educator at the school. Her name was endorsed by the school's student paper, which argued, "As a Black woman, Jackson’s intersectional identity is the antithesis of President Wilson’s. Her legacy is uniquely intertwined with our school’s past endeavors for equality." Other potential names given were August Wilson, Hilda Mason, Marion Barry, Northwest, Vincent E. Reed, and William Syphax. If chosen, Jackson would be the first female namesake of a D.C. public high school.
In April 2021, the district's schools chancellor announced a formal proposal to rename the school after the playwright August Wilson, pending approval of the D.C. Council. Advocates argued the council should reject the proposal, given the playwright's lack of strong connections to the Washington area.