Will you sign the petition to permanently ban Confederate school names?
Dear MoveOn member,
The all-white Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia has just voted to restore the names of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and other Confederate military leaders to two public schools, in a backlash against the racial reckoning that followed the police murder of George Floyd in 2020.1
Confederate leaders, who fought for the subjugation and enslavement of Black people, shouldn't have ever received these types of public honors—not when these schools were named, not in 2020, and certainly not today. But they did, and now our communities must reconcile with the horrific legacies of our past that so actively shape our present.
But these name changes are much more than a "restoration"—with this vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Equal Justice Initiative, based in Montgomery, Alabama.2
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.3
For years, protests against police violence and racism have sharpened the focus of a long-standing debate about the place for and relevance of Confederate-era monuments and iconography.4 It's become more and more clear that when we allow monuments to Confederate leaders to remain, we applaud our nation's painful history of white supremacy and exploitation. And with white supremacist propaganda and white supremacist groups reaching historic highs in recent years (peaking at a record 155 white supremacist chapters in existence around the country in 2019), the need to mobilize against the glorification of white supremacists could not be more urgent.5
Defenders of Confederates downplay that criticism and say it's about history, but statues to Jackson and other Confederate leaders were erected in 20th-century eras to symbolize racial terror, especially as some embraced a revisionist history of the Civil War.6 Our country will never be able to achieve a vision of racial justice if Confederate leaders, who were unapologetically fighting for the right to enslave Black people, are publicly celebrated. Add your name now to demand that the Shenandoah County School Board reverse its decision to rename Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School, and that it permanently ban Confederate school names.
Thanks for all you do.
–Soraya, Jaira, Kelsey, Emma, and the rest of the team
Sources:
1. "Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names to two public schools," The Guardian, May 10, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/193192?t=9&akid=390608%2E53570607%2EBAUWxZ
2. "Schools in One Virginia County to Reinstate Confederate Names," The New York Times, May 10, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/193315?t=11&akid=390608%2E53570607%2EBAUWxZ
3. "Virginia school board votes to restore schools' Confederate names," Axios, May 10, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/193193?t=13&akid=390608%2E53570607%2EBAUWxZ
4. "Confederate monuments become flashpoints in protests against racism," Axios, June 7, 2020
https://act.moveon.org/go/193194?t=15&akid=390608%2E53570607%2EBAUWxZ
5. "White Nationalist," Southern Poverty Law Center, accessed May 20, 2024
https://act.moveon.org/go/193418?t=17&akid=390608%2E53570607%2EBAUWxZ
6. "Confederate monuments become flashpoints in protests against racism," Axios, June 7, 2020
https://act.moveon.org/go/193194?t=19&akid=390608%2E53570607%2EBAUWxZ
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