Briana Brown and A.D. Carter are starting their senior year of high school in Shenandoah County on Tuesday. Mr Carter, 17, plays football, he’s on the swim team and is hoping for a soccer scholarship to college next year. Miss Brown, 17, loves taking part in musicals and dressing up for homecoming week.But their pride ends when it comes to the school’s name – Stonewall Jackson High School, named after a prominent Confederate general in America’s Civil War.
School Stonewall Jackson
The school bore that name from 1960 until July 2021, following a 2020 school board vote to change the name to Mountain View High School, amid the racial reckoning that swept the nation after the police killing of George Floyd, an unarmed black man. But just four years later, the school board reversed its decision, changing back to the original name honouring the Confederate general.
“I knew that I was going to feel uncomfortable having to walk back into this place after seeing it regress and go backwards in time”, said Mr Carter, who is black. “I really don’t identify with any of the ideals nor really any of what Stonewall Jackson stood for. “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”.
What is in a name?
In the wake of Floyd’s death, many school districts responded by renaming schools, seeking to address historical racism by removing the names of American figures who were known to have owned slaves, fought on behalf of the Confederate army, supported segregation or otherwise furthered racism against black Americans. Among the common school names targeted are Jackson, founding father Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves, and Confederate General Robert E. Lee.
According to data gathered by Education Week at least 61 schools changed their names to non-Confederate names since June 2020. There are approximately 340 schools in 21 states which are currently named after Confederate figures.
Chandra Manning, a professor of history at Georgetown University, said the naming of schools after Confederate soldiers really took off in the 1950s after the government mandated that whites-only segregated schools accept black pupils, as a way to make black students feel unwelcome.
“It wasn’t a widespread trend until the Brown versus Board of Education decision in 1954, which mandated the desegregation of public schools,” she told the BBC. “And it was after that decision that the number and the frequency of schools named for Confederate generals quite dramatically and suddenly accelerated.
But others were concerned that changing the name would remove an important part of local Civil War history. The lone dissenting board member asked, “where is this gonna end?” according to media reports at the time. “Eventually we’ve got to take a stand. If not, we’re gonna lose the country,” board member Marty Helsley said.
Changing back
Now there is a counter-reckoning of sorts, as some argue names should go back to the way they were. Shenandoah County’s school district is the first in the nation to do so, restoring the names of both Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary, named after Confederate generals, Robert E Lee and Turner Ashby.
The school board declined to comment on the May vote, which was 5-1 in favour of reverting to the original name, citing the pending lawsuit. One of the people leading the charge to restore the schools’ names is Mike Scheibe, a father of two students at Ashby Lee and Civil War re-enactor, who is also the spokesperson for the Coalition for Better Schools, a local organisation that campaigned for the school board to change the names back.
He said the schools’ names are a reminder of local history, and that the process to change their names didn’t account for everyone’s views, because pandemic-era restrictions made it challenging for people who opposed the change to attend school board meetings where the votes took place.
“When I look at Robert E Lee, the comparisons to him and George Washington are immense,” he said, noting Washington also owned slaves.
“I wonder when George Washington’s name and things like that will then have to come off of things. “But to be taught that everyone who fought for the Confederacy, or did this, or did that, is a racist slave holder, that’s all or nothing, and that really isn’t doing history justice,” he added.
Since winning the naming battle, the coalition also has raised money to help offset the costs of the name changes at Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary, such as purchasing new uniforms and merchandise for the school.
The old signs outside the school were kept on school grounds and were reinstalled following the vote. “The school board is compelling, forcing students to promulgate the message of support for the Confederacy, a message of being aligned with the Confederacy, and in particular, with the views of the Confederate leaders after which these schools are named,” Ashley Joyner Chavous, an attorney with Covington and Burling working on the suit told.
The next hearing in the case will be 1 October. “Whenever I see it, it makes me think of a time where I would not have been welcome at that school,” said Miss Brown, referencing the fact that the school was designated whites-only from when it opened in 1960 until 1963, when it integrated.
“It’s not necessarily for me, it’s for everybody, all the students of colour that are coming after me. That is who I care about,” she said. “I want them to feel comfortable in the school. And I want people to feel comfortable moving here from other places and not think that this is how we are.”
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