The shock wave of the racist murder of George Floyd and the protests that ignited in the United States in 2020 reached colleges and universities across the country, which reviewed their symbolic ties to the Confederacy. Prominent slave-owning officers of the rebellious army stopped serving to name some 60 educational centers, in an act of reckoning with the South’s past that also included the demolition of statues and the revision of the street maps of certain cities and towns. A few days after the fourth anniversary of Floyd’s death, an elementary school and a high school in Virginia have decided to retrace the path of memory and recover the names they lost then.
There are two educational centers. Stonewall Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary School will once again honor three Virginian servicemen: Jackson, who earned the nickname “Stone Wall” at the Battle of Manassas early in the war, Infantry Commander Turner Ashby and Commander General Robert E. Lee, the great Southern hero, who led the troops to their northernmost point, until losing at Gettysburg.
The debate in the school board of rural Shenandoah County, famous for the natural park of the same name, which with the colors of autumn becomes a spectacle for the urbanites of the nearby city of Washington, began on Thursday night and It continued for hours until the vote came early on Friday, five to one. It is very risky to categorically claim that a county achieves a milestone in a country as vast as this one, but apparently that is the case: it is the first in the United States to undertake a similar review. And given the extent to which education has become an ideological battleground, it likely won’t be the last.
According to The New York Times, describing a massive, agitated and controversial meeting, Tom Streett, one of the five members who voted in favor of recovering the name of Stonewall Jackson, defended his decision with an invitation to review his figure: “When you read about this man (who was, what he stood for, his character, his loyalty, his leadership, how godly he was), you realize that the standards he had were much higher than those that inspired the 2020 decision.”
The proposal was an initiative by a local conservative group called the Coalition for Better Schools, which aimed to restore the “cultural meaning” and “historical context” of the original names.
In 2022, the same board of a county with a 93% white population in which Donald Trump took seven out of 10 votes in the last presidential elections, voted against recovering the old names. The change of opinion is due to the new composition of the governing body that emerged from last November’s elections in Virginia, whose candidates in theory are not presented by either of the two major parties. In them, a republican strategy launched throughout the country after the pandemic was consummated: regain control of those decision-making bodies over educational plans and other matters, such as school budgets.
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‘Woke’ indoctrination
Traditionally, this job was mostly chosen by parents who could be considered more liberal. With the confinement, during which parents were able to see the way in which they educated their children in schools, the conservative sectors decided to organize, with the theoretical and economic support of the Republican Party; Movements such as Moms for Liberty emerged, which brings together mothers who oppose “indoctrination woke up” in schools; and campaigns grew to ban books from libraries for their anti-racist content or in favor of LGTBI rights. “Critical race theory,” which analyzes racism in the United States as a systemic evil, was also put in the spotlight. As a consequence of all this, school boards became true pitched battles in the war between the two Americas over issues such as the obligation to use masks.
The revision of history brought about by the turbulent 2020 caused a regressive reaction, of which the news arriving this Friday from Virginia is but another symptom. For some, including the black neighbors who attended the debate at Peter Muhlenberg Middle School in Woodstock on Thursday night, seeing the names of those glorified slaveholders is a hard blow to take. For others, it is time to turn the page, to consider those soldiers as figures of the past with no effect on the affairs of the present, and those tributes as tributes to the history and traditions of Virginia, whose capital, Richmond, was also the capital of the Confederation.
Almost 160 years after the end of the Civil War, how to manage that memory continues to be one of the thorniest issues in the South, as a geographical place, but also mentally. According to a report by the independent organization Southern Poverty Law Center, 2,089 nostalgic monuments remain under the Mason-Dixon line, which divided the country in the 19th century. They erected them, just as they named schools or streets, as part of the nostalgic rewriting of the past known as the Lost Cause, promoted by the descendants of the defeated after the Civil War. They forged that mythology around the idea of a worthy defeat to justify their military failure.
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