This map shows a few of the nearly 200 schools named for prominent leaders of
the Confederacy. An interactive version is available
here.
More public schools are named after Confederates than after the former slaves and abolition activists Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman. In fact, more public schools are named for Rebel Gen. Robert E. Lee than for Douglass: 78 in all, according to a count by the website
Vocativ. And they aren't all in the South. One of them is in San Diego. Another is in East Wenatchee, Washington.
All in all, Vocativ found 188 public and charter K-12 schools across the country named for prominent Confederates or for places named after prominent Confederates. Students in Hanover County, Virginia, for instance, can graduate from Stonewall Jackson Middle School and enroll at Lee-Davis High School, named for General Lee and the Confederacy's first and only president, Jefferson Davis. Matthew Watkins, Mallory Busch and Annie Daniel report:
The Texas Tribune identified 28 public schools in Texas named after Confederate leaders Lee, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston. [...] Across the nation, there has been greater scrutiny of Confederate symbols and tributes after last month's fatal shooting of nine people inside a black church in South Carolina. Stores have stopped selling Confederate flags, statues on college campuses have been vandalized and names have been reconsidered.
Some changes have already been made at the Texas schools. In Midland, the Confederate flag was eliminated as a school symbol in 1991. But Marisa Kent, a 2012 graduate, said many fans and supporters still use it, with some white students hanging it in their truck windows.
The scrutiny has generated considerable activism for changing the names. Even before Charleston, some schools had removed the "Robert E." from schools named after the general. Last year, the Duval County school district in Jacksonville, Florida, removed from a high school the name of Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who helped found the terrorist Ku Klux Klan and ordered the 1864 Fort Pillow massacre of Union prisoners of war, mostly African Americans. The school was whites-only when it opened its doors in 1959, intentionally named after Forrest so local leaders could thumb their noses at the Supreme Court's desegregation ruling in
Brown v. Board of Education. Seven other schools in other states are still named for Forrest. But in the wake of the Charleston shootings, the effort to rename such schools has ramped up.
The African-American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, who has written brilliantly about the Civil War and reparations for slavery, is not keen on taking down Confederate memorials as some activists seek to do:
He has not, however, said anything similar about schools named for prominent secessionist traitors. Some might argue that these represent history, too. But if real history were taught, instead of the "War of Northern Aggression" claptrap still shoveled at students the way it was me when I attended elementary school in Georgia, it's hard to imagine that open-minded students would fail to raise objections to attending a school named for a terrorist murderer such as Forrest, or the slavocrats who seceded to keep "the peculiar institution" and all its horrors alive. Time for their parents to stop putting up with it.