opinion

Keeping R.E. Lee school name gets tougher with each racist clash

Staunton, we need to talk. That much is clear.

Two years ago we called for a serious public discussion about the name of our city's only public high school — Robert E. Lee. We had hoped that building of a new high school building, which at that point was a glimmer in many people's eyes, would create a convenient inflection point at which the city could gracefully walk away from a name that has identified at least three different high school buildings since 1914.

But, of course, the new building was shelved and a renovation of the current structure was ordered. The question of the name remains. And we still need to have that discussion.

A draft of a fascinating new piece of academic research by Clayton McClure Brooks, an assistant professor of history at Mary Baldwin University, looks back at how the Lee High school name came into existence in 1914, back when what was known as Staunton High School sat at Baldwin and Lewis streets downtown next to what then was the fire station. She writes:

The 1914 decision to rename Staunton High School as Robert E. Lee High School came about with little discussion and no community input. The primary local newspaper at the time, the Staunton Daily News, neglected to announce the change, and many people probably missed the decision all-together unless they had been in attendance at the Staunton City School Board meeting on the evening of April 30th. ...

[T]he all-white and all-male Staunton City School Board discussed correspondence they received from the local branch of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. According to the minutes, the J.E.B. Stuart chapter, asked “that the school buildings be named after our great Southern Heroes - Jackson and Lee.” The Board acted quickly. After a short discussion, they authorized that the high school be named Robert E. Lee and the Main Street (now West Beverley) school to be called Stonewall Jackson School.” To distinguish the white schools from the African American ones and better delineate the color line, the Board voted in November of the following year to name the black schools after two respected African American men, declaring “that Sunnyside building be named Booker T. Washington School and the building on W. Johnson Street be named D. Webster Davis School.” In the 1930s, the Booker T. Washington school became the new African American high school built on Johnson Street. For nearly ten years, many Stauntonians still primarily referred to the white high school as Staunton High. Around 1925, however, Robert E. Lee became more frequently used, and truly took root with the building of the new white high school on Churchville Avenue in 1926.

The UDC wasn't operating in a vacuum, but instead was the tip of a public relations fountain pen rewriting history. McClure Brooks thoroughly analyzes how the myth was nurtured from the immediate post-war years even into the 21st Century in an upcoming academic article and elsewhere in today's Opinions section for our readers.

Although African Americans had gained freedom and rights in the reconstruction era, by 1890 they were again being subjugated. Southern legislatures, including our own, were stripping blacks of their rights. The 1902 Virginia constitution formalized the apartheid in the Old Dominion.

Through this period, the UDC worked across the state promoting a whitewashed Confederate history and argued for the elevation of Civil War figures to places of honor — places they weren't awarded in the decades after the war itself. The UDC, which wanted the new name much more than any Staunton resident apparently, was the primary propagator of the myth of the Lost Cause. Writes McClure Brooks:

Mildred “Miss Millie” Rutherford, the longtime historian of the UDC, perhaps best articulated these beliefs [of the Lost Cause]. She argued adamantly that slavery was not the cause of the Civil War, but rather it was states’ rights as well as the North’s envy of the idyllic and prosperous South. She protested that “Jealousy was the real cause that led to the war.” In her view, the misunderstood and benevolent system of slavery had been maligned, and the South, in fact, had not rebelled against the United States. Rather, she insisted that “the South never violated the Constitution...The Constitution was violated by the North.”

And into the fray stepped Staunton's 1914 school board, and so went the name of the segregated school. And the next school. And the next school. Until today.

As events of the past days should clearly show, the myth of the Civil War is being rewritten again, and used anew by those who subscribe to politics of bigotry and hate. Yes, many still subscribe to the UDC's version of history, but we find it impossible to believe that those were the people rallying around Lee in that Charlottesville Park. If they truly were inspired by that noble view of the Lost Cause, they should have been there to defend Lee from the hate-filled mob.

As we let symbols override scholarship, we cannot move as far forward as we must to have a just society. The great lie that underpinned our school's renaming misled generations, most born long after the last Confederate soldier died, also fueled at first generations of hooded terrorists and now also domestic white nationalists and modern Nazis.

For many, the name is a stark reminder of all of the propaganda peddled in the name of enforcing white supremacy of the 1900s. And now white supremacy has found the name again. It's time to break the cycle.

Perhaps the bold and brave school board that would decide to rename a reinterpreted Staunton High School could also dedicate itself to building within its walls a model center to help students interpret our commonwealth's complex, rich and sometimes troubling history as a colony, a state and, yes, as a defiant rebel that sought to deny some of its residents' humanity. Maybe it could open that center's doors to students of other area schools, who often look at Staunton's high school with trepidation because of its student diversity.

And maybe that center's name within the renamed high school could honor a man who got down off the warhorse on which he's usually depicted, moved beyond his role as a Civil War rebel and dedicated the rest of his life to scholarship as he led a great educational institution just down the Valley Pike from here. That would be, of course, Robert E. Lee. In taking the role, he wrote: "It is the duty of every citizen, in the present condition of the country, to do all in his power to aid in the restoration of peace and harmony."

And, perhaps more important, he left behind one more thought written originally to a bitter Confederate widow, but which we should take to heart today: "Dismiss from your mind all sectional feeling, and bring [your children] up to be Americans."

Our View represents the opinion of our Editorial Board: Roger Watson, president; David Fritz, executive editor; and William Ramsey, news director.