A Virginia school district voted Friday to overturn a 2020 decision that removed the names of three Confederate soldiers from the district's schools.
The Shenandoah County School Board voted to rename Honey Run and Mountain View, two schools under their jurisdiction, Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High.
The schools were renamed in 2020 following a national outcry and protests over the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. The protests called for a reexamination of entrenched racial discrimination in the United States — including the continued veneration of Confederate figures who had fought to preserve slavery in the American Civil War.
In 2020 the Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to confirm a resolution removing the names of Capt. Turner Ashby, Lt. Gen. Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson and Gen. Robert E. Lee—all of whom were born and fought in Virginia—from the two schools.
The reaction of the residents of the prefecture was quick and intense. A similar proposal to reverse the name change was brought to the board in 2022, but failed on a tie. The Coalition for Better Schools, a local group that opposes removing the officers' names, wrote a letter to the board in April of this year claiming that the overwhelming majority of the district supported restoring the original school names.
Stonewall Jackson's “legacy, while complicated, remains an important part of our local history,” the group wrote, adding that “the community values the historical connections to both Turner Ashby and Robert E Lee as prominent Virginia and local heroes”.
Shenandoah County's local battle over the legacy of Confederate figures is a microcosm of an ongoing national assessment of the place in modern society of historical figures who fought to break up the nation and preserve a brutal regime of human slavery. In 2020, a statue of Lee was removed from the state legislature after a unanimous vote by a Virginia state commission. Virginia's then-governor, Ralph Northam, said at the time that “The Confederacy is a symbol of Virginia's racist and divisive history.”
“We should all be proud of this important step forward for the Commonwealth and our country,” he added.
In the wake of the 2020 protest movement, right-wing politicians and pundits have made the delegitimization of movements that promote diversity, inclusion, and reflection on America's history of racism central to the conservative movement. Education has become a primary focus of this mission, with many states passing laws threatening the accreditation and funding of schools that teach about racial inclusion, disingenuously accusing such curricula of being inherently anti-white.
In May of last year, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin defended a statement by one of his administration officials that the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) were “dead”. This came a year after that signed an executive order directing the state Department of Education to identify and eliminate “inherently divisive” and “racist” concepts such as Critical Race Theory.
On March, Youngkin demanded that George Mason and Virginia Commonwealth universities submit their race and diversity-related curricula for review to the state Secretary of Education; His office accused the schools of conducting “a thinly veiled effort to instill the groupthink of the progressive left in Virginia students.”
With Virginia's governor fully invested in eliminating initiatives aimed at correcting the social and educational remnants of racial discrimination, it's no wonder some Virginians are clamoring to once again honor the men who fought to create a nation where slavery it could remain the law of the land.
from our partners at https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/virginia-school-district-rename-confederate-officers-1235018719/