White power
The Virginia NAACP sued a county school board Tuesday over its reinstatement of Confederate military names to two schools, accusing it of embracing segregationist values and subjecting Black students to a racially discriminatory educational environment.
The school board in Shenandoah County voted 5-1 last month to revert the name of Mountain View High School back to Stonewall Jackson High School, and that of Honey Run Elementary to Ashby Lee Elementary. The vote reversed a 2020 decision to remove the original names against a backdrop of nationwide protests over racial injustice.
Who is Ashby Lee? I had to google. Ashby and Lee are two people; Turner Ashby was a Confederate cavalry commander. Two for the price of one!
So here we have a school board voting to restore the names of three military officers who fought to maintain the enslavement of human beings. How very ugly.
The NAACP wrote that students will be “required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement.”
The school board members in Shenandoah County who had voted in May to restore the Confederate names said they were honoring popular community sentiment. They said the previous board members who had removed the names in 2020 had ignored constituents and due process on the matter.
Ahhh shaddup. The hell with popular communniny senniment. When communniny senniment is pro-enslavement of Other Races it doesn’t deserve to be honored.
It can be hard to escape the confederate heroes here in northern Virginia. Even in our overwhelmingly blue county, until just a few years ago we had a Lee Highway, a Washington-Lee High School, and a Jeff Davis Highway. And of course the process of renaming them led to complaints about changing or forgetting history (along with crocodile tears about the cost of changing signs, and the cost to businesses along those highways). But I don’t think anyone’s forgotten who Lee and Jackson and Davis were–certainly the school curriculum won’t allow it.
WaM, It seems to me that changing them is acknowledging history by removing the names of traitors from public buildings. Putting the names of those who committed treason on public buildings is forgetting history, or at least whitewashing it.
Indeed. It’s telling that there are few if any monuments to or streets or schools named after Benedict Arnold (even though he was the most successful rebel General in the early years of the Revolution).
And of course Longstreet, the one Confederate General who supported Reconstruction after the war, gets almost none. Not that he deserves any–I’d rather melt down all the military monuments–but he’s far down on the list of southern villains.
The issue to me is less that these people (almost always men) whose names adorn the public buildings and streets are not being honored for their noble lives, which were besmirched by their participation in the secession but were otherwise notable, but they are rather being honored specifically because of their involvement in the secession, either in the government or the military. The names were added after the Civil War by organizations promoting Confederate monuments and the Lost Cause narrative. To my knowledge, there are no monuments to David Farragut in the South, nor any street there named for Winfield Scott, nor a holiday there in honor of George Henry Thomas; all three were illustrious high-ranking officers from the South who rejected the Confederacy and served in the Union military. And yet the people suggesting these Confederate names be kept will often point to service outside of the Civil War as justification. Motte and Bailey.
Oh that’s interesting.
Motte-Bailey High School.
Good point, Sackbut, and thanks for the snippet of history.
Ha!