In the wake of George Floyd’s murder, a school board in northern Virginia stripped the names of Confederate military figures from two schools. Four years later, the board approved a motion to restore the names.
The school board in Shenandoah County, Virginia, early Friday approved a proposal that will restore the names of Confederate military leaders to two public schools.
The measure, which passed 5-1, reverses a previous board’s decision in 2020 to change the names of schools that had been linked to Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby, three men who led the pro-slavery Southern states during the Civil War.
Mountain View High School will go back to the name Stonewall Jackson High School. Honey Run Elementary School will go back to the name Ashby-Lee Elementary School.
The board stripped their names after a Minneapolis police officer murdered George Floyd, fueling a national racial reckoning. The calls for racial justice and equity inspired some communities to remove Confederate symbolism and statues of Confederate generals.
But in Shenandoah County, the conservative group Coalition for Better Schools petitioned school officials to reinstate the names of Jackson, Lee and Ashby. “We believe that revisiting this decision is essential to honor our community’s heritage and respect the wishes of the majority,” the coalition wrote in an April 3 letter to the board, according to a copy posted online.
Very true, but his time in an official position was limited to a matter of days. I was just trying to think of the names that jumped out at me as still being regularly in the spotlight for no good reason. His platform should have ended as quickly as it began, but media is still giving him a voice over better options, and he’s still a symptom of a greater issue in how people get news.