I saw the first “Save the Name” sign in a front yard in Waynesboro a few weeks ago, and wondered to myself why someone here would care what Staunton called its high school.
I’m not that naïve.
Local high-school rivalries are nothing in the context of the Civil War that some are still fighting 153 years after the surrender in Appomattox.
Robert E. Lee was the commander of the troops of the Confederacy, and if you buy the “Save the Name” whitewash, he was an honorable man defending his home state from a Yankee invasion.
What that has to do with Staunton and its high school, of course, is immaterial. That’s the name, has been forever, and any attempt to change it is an assault on local history.
Except …
The name hasn’t been on the school forever. The school board renamed the high school after Lee in 1914, nearly 50 years after the end of the Civil War, at an interesting time in American history.
Staunton native Woodrow Wilson was in his first term as president. Yes, that Woodrow Wilson, whose birthplace in Staunton is home to his presidential library.
As much as you’d like to remember Wilson for leading the push toward the establishment of an international order that would eventually spawn the United Nations, he was also responsible for resegregating the federal bureaucracy, reversing years of gains for African Americans, in addition to famously throwing a prominent civil-rights leader raising issue with Wilson over his broken promises on racial justice out of the Oval Office, and the regrettable White House screening of a movie celebrating the founding of the KKK, “Birth of a Nation.”
Whoo, boy, so, yeah, in 1914, the Staunton School Board renamed its high school after Robert E. Lee, as the Staunton-born President of the United States was doubling down on Jim Crow.
The name stuck through the end of school segregation in the 1960s, and now, 50-plus years later, we’re told that the name itself is an important piece of the city’s heritage, more whitewash.
This notion of “heritage” is so important to those who seek cover for what continued celebrations of the Confederacy really mean to them.
They will tell you that the Confederate flag, for instance, is part of their “heritage,” failing to note, conveniently, that the flag only represents four years of American history out of the more than 400 dating back to the settlement of Jamestown in 1607, and what those four years distinguish.
States that flew the flag were attempting to break the Union to defend the institution of slavery, and “honorable men” like Robert E. Lee leading the military efforts on behalf of the Confederacy were aiming their guns at American soldiers.
If that’s the “heritage” that you wish to celebrate, so be it, good on you, but you need to know that you’re celebrating traitors who defended the continued enslavement of African Americans for the purpose of monetary gain of Southern monied elites.
And if you want to tell yourself that, OK, I’m not that much into Southern heritage, but the high school has been Robert E. Lee High School for as long as any of us remember, and that’s all I care about, is the name, well, sorry, but it’s more than a name.
Truth is, every day that passes with that name on that school is another day that Staunton tells its residents and people thinking of visiting that it is either ignorant of what it was that Lee and the Confederacy was fighting for, or it knows it all too well, and wants the world to know, yeah, that’s where we are, in 2018, still reminiscing about that Lost Cause.
Whichever one of those is your motivation for putting that “Save the Name” sign in your front yard, just own it already.
Column by Chris Graham
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