The right naming schools after Confederate generals in 2024 is part of their strategy to preserve white supremacy

The Civil War is not over to these people.

The push and pull between white supremacist rule and a multi-cultural United States is nothing new. But on Friday we saw a first in our nation’s history: A school board voted to restore the name of three Confederate generals to their public schools.  That’s right, in 2024, the right is naming schools after people who fought and killed to preserve both chattel slavery and white supremacy. This is just the latest salvo in the GOP’s campaign to move America backwards to before the Civil Rights movement.

This jaw-dropping event happened on Friday, when the Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia voted 5-1 to reinstate the names Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School to honor Confederate Generals Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby.

This vote to celebrate the traitors who killed US soldiers in the hope of maintaining the barbarism known as chattel slavery was led by the conservative group Coalition for Better Schools. Now the school board will spend an estimated six figures in tax dollars to send a message that this area of Virginia is a place where white supremacy rules.

This action is all part of the right’s response to the racial reckoning that was kicked off in the United States after the brutal murder of George Floyd in 2020 and the Black Lives Matter protests that followed. In fact, the names of these Virginia schools were changed in that very period.  

But this is not simply a “reinstatement” of Confederate names. Rather this is a manifestation of the white right’s desperate efforts to maintain control in the face of changing America. After all, this is exactly what white supremacists did in the past when they felt challenged.

As a reminder, the greatest number of Confederate statutes were erected in the early 1900’s spearheaded by United Daughters of the Confederacy as Jim Crow laws were being enacted across the South.  These racist laws and the Confederate memorials were part of a scheme to both celebrate and preserve white supremacy.

The next spike in Confederate monuments came from 1940’s to 1960’s. Why then nearly 100 years after the Civil War? Simple, these statutes were built in reaction to the Civil Rights movement to send a message that white power still ruled that area. It’s no coincidence that in 1956, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag and in 1962, South Carolina placed the Confederate battle flag atop its capitol building. 

When it comes to schools being named after traitors who took up arms against the United States of America to fight for the Confederacy, want to guess when the biggest wave of that occurred? Was it shortly after The Civil War? Nope, it was following the landmark US Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education in 1954 which ruled that segregated public schools were constitutional.  Between that 1954 court decision and 1970, our nation saw the largest spike in schools being after those who fought to defend slavery.

In fact, the schools at issue in Virginia were opened in that time frame, with Stonewall Jackson high school opening in 1960. That’s right. The naming of these Virginia schools was part of the backlash to the Civil Rights movement and Brown v. Board of Education. The white officials in that area of Virginia at the time wanted to ensure that people knew white power still reigned supreme.

That was the exact message of the right-wing school board Friday when they voted to honor these Confederate generals.  Indeed, community members told them that point blank such as when Sarah Kohrs, a Shenandoah county resident and parent, said: “With the world watching, the Shenandoah county school board sent a terrible message.” She added, “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.”

But this action by the Shenandoah County School can’t be viewed in a vacuum. It’s part of the right’s modern era war to preserve white supremacy. We see that with their so-called bans on “Critical Race Theory” in numerous Red States that bar teaching about white supremacy, the evils of chattel slavery or any other topic that causes “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race."  Of course, in Shenandoah County, the right wingers don’t care if Black students feel “discomfort” attending a school named after people who fought to own Black people as chattel.

We see this as well with the right’s campaign to end diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in schools and even in private corporations. And just last year, the GOP controlled US Supreme Court barred the use of “affirmative action” by colleges and universities when it comes to admitting students.  The GOP appears to want to go back to pre-Brown v. Board of Education days where racial segregation in schools is permitted.

The re-naming of the Virginia schools is simply a part of this effort. I wonder what the right-wing group will do at the school’s renaming to further honor the Confederate Generals? Will they hold a mock slave auction to show people what would have overjoyed the slave owning Confederate General Robert E. Lee--whose military actions resulted in the deaths of more than 300,000 patriotic Union soldiers?  Will they share stories of how Stonewall Jackson treated the enslaved people he owned? How will they celebrate slave owning, Confederate officer Turner Ashby,  who “led a violent pro-slavery mob in an attack” against anti-slavery activists in 1856?  Ashby also led armed men against John Brown’s anti-slavery uprising.

I can assure you the right-wing school board knows full well what Lee, Jackson and Ashby were about. They are honoring them for that very conduct and especially for their efforts to maintain white supremacy in the Civil War. It’s also why just last month, Mississippi’s Republican Governor Tate Reeves proclaimed April to be Confederate Heritage Month.

The Confederacy is long gone, but the mindset that fueled it is alive and well in today’s GOP.

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