On Friday, The Shenandoah County School Board in Virginia voted 5-1 to reinstate the names of Confederate officers to two school campuses, reversing a decision made in 2020, according to multiple news sources.
The Associated Press (AP) reported that Mountain View High School has been renamed to Stonewall Jackson High School, and Honey Run Elementary has become Ashby Lee Elementary, four years after the names were removed, to significant controversy across the nation.
The decision was so controversial that the school board that voted to change the names were removed in 2023, and replaced by a far more conservative school board that has now undone the previous group’s most disliked decision.
The AP reported that one board member wrote in an op-ed for the Northern Virginia Daily at the time that the election gave Shenandoah County “the first 100% conservative board since anyone can remember.”
Reuters reported that the schools were first renamed due to pressure from the Black Lives Matter movement, following the death of George Floyd in the summer of that year.
More than 60 schools removed Confederate names from their schools in some capacity, but none had reversed their decisions until now, according to Reuters, citing Education Week, which has kept a tracker of the data since 2020.
During the board’s six hour meeting on Thursday, member Gloria Carlineo said that opponents of the Confederate renaming campaign should “stop bringing racism and prejudice into everything,” as it “detracts from true cases of racism,” Reuters added.
Following the vote, Sarah Kohrs, who co-led a citizens group in opposition of the reversion, said that the group deplored the decision to “regress and ‘honor’ Civil War figures that consciously betrayed the United States and were proponents of slavery and segregation,” and said she would continue to work to promote public knowledge of “complete history, good and bad.”
“This decision seems more about vengeance, control, and hatred than heritage or due process,” she said, per Reuters.
The elementary school, Ashby Lee Elementary, is named after two separate Confederate generals, General Robert E. Lee, the most notable leader of the Confederate forces, and General Turner Ashby, a Confederate cavalry officer.
According to his biography on Encyclopedia Britannica, he won numerous victories against Union generals before eventually surrendering to general Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.
General Turner Ashby served under Stonewall Jackson and was at times combative with his superior officer. He supposedly considered a duel with Jackson but never ended up doing so, according to the Warfare History Network. He was killed in a skirmish against Union cavalry outside Harrisonburg, Virginia. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, the namesake of the high school, was a Confederate general who was known for his military prowess and tactics. He was known as “stonewall” due to his actions at the first Battle of Bull Run in 1861, when he charged with his men and holding against the Union troops “like a stone wall.” Jackson was killed by friendly fire at the battle of Chancellorsville in May 1863, according to the History Channel’s website.
The post Virginia School Board Reverses Name Change Of Two Schools Named After Confederate Generals appeared first on Resist the Mainstream.
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Author: John Symank
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