Washington (AFP) – A Virginia school board voted Friday to restore the names of Civil War Southern generals to two schools, four years after they were removed following a wave of protests for racial justice.
The move by the Shenandoah County school board, in a five to one vote, bucks a nationwide trend of striking the names of prominent figures in the pro-slavery Confederacy from schools, US military bases and monuments.
Honey Run Elementary School will once again be known as Ashby-Lee Elementary, while Mountain View High School will go back to being Stonewall Jackson High. Both are in the town of Quicksburg in northern Virginia.
Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson and Robert E. Lee were Confederate generals while Turner Ashby was a cavalry commander during the 1861-65 Civil War. All three were Virginians.
A campaign to remove Confederate symbols first gained momentum following the June 2015 murders in South Carolina of nine black churchgoers by an avowed white supremacist. It accelerated following the May 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man murdered by a white police officer during an arrest in Minnesota.
The decision to restore the names of the Confederate officers to the two schools came during a marathon meeting of the Shenandoah County school board which ended early Friday. The meeting featured emotional appeals by students, former students, parents and residents.
A man wearing a T-shirt that read “Pride, Honor, Tradition” said that removing the names of the Confederate officers from schools was “erasing history” and amounted to “indoctrinating children.” A Black eighth-grade student disagreed. “If the names are restored, I would have to represent a man that fought for my ancestors to be slaves,” she said.
Gene Kilby, the son of civil rights activists, also argued against the move. “The Civil War was fought and lost by the Confederacy,” Kilby said. “Do you want to continue to memorialize individuals that led an insurrection against the United States?”
During the Civil War, the Confederate South seceded from the United States and fought to maintain slavery.
© 2024 AFP
