After a meeting that lasted hours, the Shenandoah County School Board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to the district’s schools.
With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the nation to return Confederate names to schools that removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama.
The vote reversed a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd sparked nationwide demands for a racial reckoning. During a virtual meeting in July 2020, the summer of the pandemic and protests, the board voted 5-1 to drop the names of two schools — Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High — that it considered incompatible with a recently adopted resolution condemning racism. The schools were renamed Honey Run and Mountain View the following year.
But a fury had been unleashed in the rural Virginia mountain county. People flocked to school board meetings, denouncing the name changes as secretive and rushed without notice, and expressing deeper resentment at the cultural changes they saw as being forced upon them.
After a new vote that resulted in a tie in 2022, the name changes stood. But opponents vowed that Stonewall Jackson would be revived. And on Friday, he was.
“When you read about this man – who he was, what he stood for, his character, his loyalty, his leadership, how godly he was – the standards he had were far higher than those of n “any leader in the school system in 2020.” said Tom Streett, one of the board members. Then he and four of his five colleagues voted to bring back Jackson and the other names.
The county, which is more than 90% white, is not alone in reversing decisions made in 2020. Across the United States, a host of measures passed in 2020 and 2021, including new school curricula racial history of the country, were reduced or eliminated in the years that followed. Politicians denounced “critical race theory” and schools reinstated mascots that had been condemned as racist. But as of Friday, it appears none have brought back Confederate namesakes.
The school board’s vote was not a surprise. Many of the signs removed from Stonewall Jackson High were kept rather than discarded, as if awaiting their return. The three board members who voted in 2022 to keep the new names all decided not to run for reelection the following year.
“We were exhausted,” said Marty Helsey, a 73-year-old farmer who served one term.
When the issue was first raised in 2020, Mr. Helsey was the only one to vote against dropping Confederate names and urged the board to take more time to make that decision. But in 2022, he said, he thinks the district should just move on.
“They can’t let it go,” Mr. Helsey said before Friday’s vote. “It’s been four years!” The civil war only lasted four years!
Three conservatives won vacant board seats in 2023, pledging among other things to remove the “woke left agenda” from schools. They didn’t campaign specifically on school names, even though many residents could guess where they stood.
In April, a group calling itself Coalition for Better Schools submitted a letter to the school board regarding the name issue. The group said it conducted a survey of areas of the county served by the two schools and found “overwhelming support for restoring” the names. Questions were raised about the reliability of these results: fewer than one in seven recipients returned a completed survey – but despite this, the council agreed to take up the matter.
On Thursday evening, many residents gathered in a middle school cafeteria for a board meeting that lasted past midnight, including four hours of public comment.
Among the dozens of people who spoke against reinstating the old names were white county residents who said they were descended from Confederate soldiers and black residents who were among the first to integrate local schools. Several speakers pointed out that Stonewall Jackson High was established in 1959, during Virginia’s “massive resistance” to integration. Others pointed out the irony of beginning the meeting with a pledge of allegiance to a flag against which Jackson waged war.
“I think it’s unfair to me that reinstating the name is up for discussion,” said Aliyah Ogle, 14, whose mother was one of two black people in her class at what was then Stonewall Jackson High and that, at least until Friday’s vote. , planned to attend school herself next year. Jackson died fighting for slavery, Aliyah said. “If he had won, I would not be allowed to attend public school and I would not be speaking here today.”
People who wanted the old names back repeatedly said they didn’t see the racism people talked about at Stonewall Jackson, and that their black classmates never complained about it. Divisions within the community, these speakers insisted, had been ushered in by the board’s 2020 vote, which they viewed as underhanded and part of a “woke movement” that had “swept the country as a nasty cancer.”
“Some people say they are offended by the names of the schools,” said Fred Neese, 69, a poultry farmer. “I am offended that they are denigrating the reputation of our ancestors. I’m offended that the previous board wasn’t up front with people.”
Around 11:30 a.m., the board members themselves began to speak out on the issue, one by one. One denounced identity politics, another read a healing prayer.
The board’s chairman, a retired Army colonel, said America has far less racism and civil strife than anywhere else in the world. Another member, Latina and the board’s only minority member, said people who speak out against racism may have good intentions but are “misled by those who seek to divide to reinforce their political ideology.”
But most board members said that after what they considered a misguided and undemocratic decision four years ago, they wanted to do what the majority of the community seemed to want: restore Confederate names.
And shortly after midnight, they voted to put things back the way they were.
News Source : www.nytimes.com
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