The Refugee Elected President: Refugee Student in Charlottesville Exemplifies National Conversation

Kibiriti Majuto is the senior-class president at Charlottesville High School, an ethnically diverse and STEM-obsessed campus in the middle of Virginia’s rolling hills. Seven miles away from Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and only a five-minute drive from the University of Virginia, Charlottesville High’s 1,203 students speak a total of 34 languages.

 

Majuto has lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, for five years—the entirety of his time in the United States. He arrived from South Africa, where his family waited in limbo while escaping war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. …

 

As a refugee student, Majuto is far from an outlier. Charlottesville is one of 29 U.S. cities home to the International Rescue Committee, a nongovernmental organization that provided humanitarian aid to 23 million people globally in 2015.