An all-white school board in Virginia has voted to restore the names of Robert E Lee and other Confederate military leaders to two public schools in a backlash to the racial reckoning that followed the police murder of George Floyd.
The decision to restore the names of Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby was taken on Friday morning by the six-member school board in Shenandoah county. Only one of the members voted against the resolution.
As a result of the vote, Mountain View high school will return to its pre-2020 name, Stonewall Jackson high school, and Honey Run elementary school will once again be named Ashby-Lee elementary school – honoring three men who were seminal in leading the attempt to secede from the Union in defense of slavery.
The school board’s U-turn is one of the sharpest examples of a nationwide pushback by conservative groups against the changes that were made after the summer of protests in 2020 following Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. At least 160 Confederate symbols were taken down in that year, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks such public emblems.
Sarah Kohrs, a Shenandoah county resident and parent, said: “With the world watching, the Shenandoah county school board sent a terrible message.
“We deplore the board’s decision to regress and ‘honor’ civil war figures that consciously betrayed the United States and were proponents of slavery and segregation,” Kohrs added.
“This decision seems more about vengeance, control and hatred than heritage or due process. Looking ahead, the many good people of Shenandoah county will have to work even harder to ensure that our complete history, good and bad, remains available to students and the public. Our fight for what’s right is not over.”
The Shenandoah county reinstatement of Confederate names followed a public debate at the school board in which 80 people spoke, according to NBC News, mostly in opposition to the restoration.
They included Alea Ogle, 13, who said that if the Confederate names were restored, as a Black student she would have to attend a school that recognized “a man who fought for my ancestors to be slaves. That would make me feel like I am disrespecting my ancestors and going against what my family and I believe, which is that we should all be treated equally and that slavery was cruel and an awful thing.”
The school board had come under pressure from a local conservative group calling itself the Coalition for Better Schools. Last month, it wrote to the board requesting a return to the old school names.
“The legacy of Stonewall Jackson, while complex, remains an important part of our local history,” the group said. As for Lee, the commander of the Confederate States Army, and the Confederate cavalry commander Ashby, they were described as “prominent Virginians and local heroes”.
The coalition claimed to have conducted a survey of local citizens that found that 91.3% wanted to revert to the original school names, but provided no information on how many had participated in the poll. “We believe that revisiting this decision is essential to honor our community’s heritage and respect the wishes of the majority,” it said.
Despite the conservatives’ emphasis on honoring history and heritage, the two schools in question were only founded in the modern era. Stonewall Jackson high school opened in 1960.
In 2022, the school board considered reverting to the Confederate names but on that occasion lacked the votes to make the change. The board’s then vice-chair, and current chair, Dennis Barlow, said during that debate that he saw Jackson as a “gallant commander”, while those who had led the post-Floyd move to reform the school names were in his view “creepy”, “elitist” and “from the dark side”.
Melissa Hellmann contributed reporting
