This is Ashley. She's 15 years old and a freshman at Robert E. Lee High School.
Her school was named after, well, Robert E. Lee,
the man who commanded the army of the Confederate States of America.
That army waged a brutal war against the United States,
fighting to maintain a society in which Black people were enslaved and violently
exploited. Today, Ashley's school provides a daily
reminder of this history by honoring the men who insisted they
had a right to enslave people like her. And she's not alone in this experience.
The vast majority of the students at Lee High School
are Black, like her. Strange as it may seem,
Ashley's situation is far from unusual. In fact,
there are hundreds of schools in the United States that are named after
people who fought to preserve slavery and racial hierarchy.
Almost all of them are public schools and most serve student bodies that are
majority non-white. How did this happen?
The schools reflect not only a legacy of the Confederacy,
but the more recent and long-lasting history of white resistance to racial
equality. Throughout American history, Black
communities have sought to educate themselves at almost
all costs, even when, during their time of enslavement,
it was illegal for a Black person to learn to read and write.
For most of that time, however, states and institutions have been hostile to the
idea of Black education, seeking instead to reinforce a mythology
of racial difference in which Black children are seen as less
capable and less deserving of the same educational opportunities
afforded to white children. This hostility was particularly active
in the 1950s and 1960s when Black Americans fought
to integrate public schools. In 1954, when the Supreme Court outlawed
school segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education, many
white Americans were outraged. In response, many white-dominated
communities in the United States simply refused to integrate their
schools.
Instead, they built new, state of the art schools
open to white children only. To make their message especially clear,
many of these schools were named after Confederate leaders who defended slavery,
like Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson.
This was the case with Lee High, which was built and named
in 1955, just one year after Brown, and opened as a white-only school.
In many communities, this refusal continued for decades.
Even though schools were no longer explicitly white-only,
communities adopted many strategies to maintain de facto segregation.
Naming schools after Confederate leaders was one such strategy.
It was a way to signal that white southerners would resist integration by
any means necessary, and it served to reinforce racial
hierarchies by referencing a terrifying and violent history.
As public schools eventually began to open their doors to Black children,
white students fled to private schools. Now, the majority of white children in
Ashley's home city go to private school while many of its Black children have no
choice but to attend the public schools whose names celebrate people who fought
to preserve slavery and white supremacy. Truth and justice require us to confront
our history honestly and commit ourselves to dismantling the
legacy of racial injustice. This will require changing the names of
schools that dishonor the nation's commitment
to equality and justice for all.