In reversal of broader trend, Virginia school board votes to restore schools' Confederate names



There has been a concerted effort in recent years to sever ties with the nation's past. Iconoclasts and revisionists have toppled hundreds of statues, renamed species, melted down busts, removed church windows, dug up graves, changed place names, and gone so far — as the Biden administration did last year — as to remove the Jewish American-designed Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

A school board in Virginia bucked the trend early Friday morning.

Two schools in the Shenandoah County Public Schools district were renamed in 2021 following a school board vote the previous year. Stonewall Jackson High School, named after Confederate infantry Gen. Thomas Jonathan "Stonewall" Jackson, became Mountain View High School. Ashby-Lee Elementary School, named after Robert E. Lee, commander of the Army of Northern Virginia, and rebel cavalry commander Turner Ashby, became Honey Run Elementary School. The Confederates' associations with slavery were reportedly a key factor in the decision to make the changes.

Axios reported that the Coalition for Better Schools, a local conservative group, continued pushing to change the names back after an unsuccessful attempt in 2022. The group claimed in a April 3 letter to the members of the SCPS board that the group understood "that the decision to rename these schools was made in response to discussions surrounding Confederate symbols" but that "revisiting this decision is essential to honor our community's heritage and respect the wishes of the majority."

After an SCPS School Board meeting Thursday night, which ran for roughly six hours and involved extensive commentary from the public, the board voted 5-1 to overturn the 2020 decision.

Opponents to the restorations suggested the changes would put a gloss on historical racism.

"If you vote to restore the name Stonewall Jackson in 2024, you will be resurrecting an act in 1959 that is forever rooted in mass resistance and Jim Crow segregation," said one resident.

Kyle Gutshall, the lone member who voted against the motion, suggested there was no clear justification for the restoration, reported WLOX-TV.

"We've talked about the right way, the wrong way to do it," said Guthall. "Things like this really come down to perspective and how you view things."

Some supporters suggested that even an imperfect history is worth remembering.

"People in the Shenandoah Valley say that only the Confederates are the ones who did nasty things or did nasty things to black people," said Dennis Barlow, the school board chair. "You just stopped reading your history and you're not being realistic. War's hell."

The motion that ultimately passed early Friday morning requires that the restoration be implemented using funds privately donated exclusively "and not be borne by the school system or government tax funds.

Robert Watson, an assistant professor of history at Hampton University, suggested to USA Today ahead of the vote that the district may be the first in the nation to reverse course on Confederate school name changes.

"If it does get traction in the Shenandoah Valley, it probably will get some traction [in] other places," said Watson.

A US school board in Shenandoah County, Virginia, voted in favor of restoring previously removed Confederate names to two schools, becoming the first community in the nation to reinstate such names
— (@)

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Pentagon gets its way: Reconciliation Memorial will be removed after judge lifts injunction



Iconoclasts in the previous Democrat-controlled 116th Congress and the Biden Department of Defense are getting exactly what they wanted: the toppling of the Jewish American-designed Reconciliation Memorial in Arlington National Cemetery.

While Judge Rossie David Alston Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia temporarily halted the plan to dismantle the 109-year-old monument, he reversed course Tuesday, giving the go-ahead for the Christmastime toppling.

What's the background?

The group Defend Arlington, affiliated with Save Southern Heritage Florida, unsuccessfully sued in the District of Columbia last month accusing the Army, which oversees the cemetery, of violating regulations in an effort to rush the process and get the monument down by January.

There is an apparent need to expedite the process, given the deadline set for the Pentagon by the Democrat-controlled 116th Congress in its National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021. Per section 370 of the NDAA, virtually all military assets even remotely linked to the Confederacy are to be removed by Jan. 1, 2024.

After the D.C. federal court dismissed the heritage group's lawsuit, Defend Arlington tried once more in Virginia.

Contrary to claims made by the cemetery, their lawsuit alleged, "The removal will desecrate, damage, and likely destroy the Memorial longstanding at ANC as a grave marker and impede the Memorial's eligibility for listing on the National Register of Historic Places."

Judge Alston granted the plaintiffs a temporary restraining order, expressing concern over the possibility that neighboring grave sites might be disturbed. He hedged by stating, "Should the representations in this case be untrue or exaggerated the Court may take appropriate sanctions."

The cemetery indicated Monday that the Army had begun "disassembly of the monument atop the Confederate Memorial prior to the court issuing the temporary restraining order," but would comply with the order and halt further work.

— (@)

A vacant plinth for Christmas

Prior to Tuesday's hearing, Alston toured the cemetery and inspected the site, reported the Associated Press.

"I saw no desecration of any graves," said Alston. "The grass wasn't even disturbed."

The Trump-nominated judge subsequently issued an 18-page ruling Tuesday evening lifting the restraining order. Alston indicated the plaintiff's allegations about the removal efforts, specifically the suggestion that graves were being disturbed, "were, at best, ill-informed and, at worse, inaccurate."

During the hearing, Alston also questioned Defend Arlington lawyers' claims about the nature of the monument, stating "a slave running after his 'massa' as he walks down the road. What is reconciling about that?" reported Politico.

John Rowley, a lawyer for Defend Arlington, said in a statement obtained by the New York Times, "While we respect the Court’s decision, we continue to believe the evidence shows that in its haste to remove the Reconciliation Memorial, the DoD failed to conduct the reviews mandated by law regarding historic preservation and environmental impacts."

Kerry L. Meeker, a spokeswoman for the cemetery, told the Times in a statement that the iconoclasm would resume immediately and would be completed by Friday.

"While the work is performed, surrounding graves, headstones and the landscape will be carefully protected by a dedicated team, preserving the sanctity of all those laid to rest," said Meeker.

The monument, designed by Moses Jacob Ezekiel, a Confederate veteran and the first Jewish graduate of Virginia Military Institute, will be thrown into storage "until the final disposition has been determined."

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) previously indicated he intends to move the memorial to the New Market Battlefield State Historic Park in the Shenandoah Valley.

The Reconciliation Monument was approved in 1906 by Secretary of War William Taft; commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910; designed by Ezekiel; and unveiled in Section 16 of the cemetery by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914.

Both those supportive of and those opposed to the monument's original construction understood it to be signal reconciliation in the aftermath of the Civil War.

The monument, at least as it stood Tuesday, consists of a bronze female figure crowned with olive leaves atop a 32-foot pedestal. The female figure holds a laurel wreath, a pruning hook, and a plow. At her feet is a biblical inscription that reads, "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks."

Defend Arlington noted in a Meta post, "We are disappointed that American's [sic] had another breach in upholding the rule of law today. Hon. Rossie David Alston, Jr. visited Arlington National Cemetery ex-parte. We expect the crane is moving over the top of Ezekiel's grave this moment."

Controlling the past

If the past three years provide any indication, the removal of the Reconciliation Monument will not placate the left's desire to erase and revise history.

Since the ruinous 2020 BLM riots kicked off, statues of former U.S. presidents including George Washington, Ulysses Grant, and Theodore Roosevelt have been torn down by leftists, both the kind empowered by politicians and the kind empowered by voters.

Statues of Christopher Columbus were officially removed, toppled, or vandalized nationwide, as were hundreds of other statues commemorating consequential historic figures. Apolitical statues such as theWorld War I memorial in Birmingham, Alabama, and the statue of Polish hero Thaddeus Kosciuszko were afforded no exemption.

There appear to be incentives for iconoclasts to stay the course. For instance, vandals who destroyed the Sacramento statue of a historic Catholic missionary were rewarded last month with a substitute palatable to those antipathetic to the region's Christian heritage.

Efforts to sever the present from the past have gone far beyond statues.

Blaze News recently reported that the American Ornithological Society announced on Nov. 1 that it will begin changing the names of 70-80 birds currently named after people next year.

"There is power in a name, and some English bird names have associations with the past that continue to be exclusionary and harmful today," said AOS president Colleen Handel, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska.

Biden Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland similarly has been scrubbing place names across the country that include the Algonquin word for woman, as it had been deemed derogatory by activist groups.

Ezekial's erasure wasn't the first and will not be the last under the current administration.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Pentagon to tear down Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery by week's end despite protest



The Department of Defense has dutifully taken part in an iconoclastic sweep of American history that has left graves dug up, statues toppled, animals renamed, busts melted down, and church windows removed.

Despite significant backlash, it appears no exception will ultimately be made for the Reconciliation Monument in Arlington National Cemetery. Workers will remove the 109-year-old monument this week, providing revisionists in the nation's capital with a gift of absence just in time for Christmas.

What's the background?

The Reconciliation Monument, also called the Confederate Memorial, was approved in 1906 by Secretary of War William Taft; commissioned by the United Daughters of the Confederacy in 1910; designed by Jewish former Confederate soldier Moses Jacob Ezekiel; and unveiled in Section 16 of the cemetery by President Woodrow Wilson on June 4, 1914.

The monument consists of a bronze female figure crowned with olive leaves atop a 32-foot pedestal. The female figure holds a laurel wreath, a pruning hook, and a plow. At her feet is a biblical inscription that reads, "They have beat their swords into plough-shares and their spears into pruning hooks."

Another inscription on the memorial states in Latin, "The victorious cause was pleasing to the gods, but the lost cause to Cato."

Thirty-two figures of mythical gods, Southern soldiers, and civilians are depicted around the base, including two black characters — one holding a baby and the other a slave following his owner to war. The memorial also displays 14 shields representing the 11 Confederate states and the border states of Maryland, Kentucky, and Missouri.

The memorial was intended as a monument to reconciliation in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Union army veteran President William McKinley, who supported legislation in 1900 to establish a Confederate section in Arlington Cemetery, proclaimed four days after men from former Confederate states ensured America's victory against Spanish forces, "In the spirit of fraternity we should share with you in the care of the graves of Confederate soldiers. … Sectional feeling no longer holds back the love we feel for each other. The old flag again waves over us in peace with new glories."

The American Conservative underscored that it was long understood to be a reconciliation monument, such that "some Confederate groups at the time opposed the statue and memorial precisely because they opposed the reconciliation that it symbolized. At the memorial’s dedication in 1914, President Wilson praised it as an 'emblem of a reunited people.'"

Arlington National Cemetery highlighted the monument's historic value, noting that it "offers an opportunity for visitors to reflect on the history and meanings of the Civil War, slavery, and the relationship between military service, citizenship and race in America. This memorial ... invites us to understand how politics and culture have historically shaped how Americans have buried and commemorated the dead."

Removal

The National Defense Authorization Act for fiscal year 2021, passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, required the removal of "all names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia that honor or commemorate the Confederate Sates of America (commonly referred to as the 'Confederacy') or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America from all assets of the Department of Defense."'

Congress established an eight-member commission in 2021 and tasked it with renaming military assets in accordance with this requirement. The deadline for such changes and removals is Jan. 1, 2024.

The commission addressed the Reconciliation Monument in its final report on Sept. 19, 2022, recommending that Arlington National Cemetery "remove the 32 life-sized bronze statues from the top of the monument but not remove the entire monument because doing so might damage graves under the structure."

Arlington National Cemetery indicated in March that it had begun preparations for the "careful removal and relocation" of the monument as required by Congress and demanded by Biden's Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin.

Backlash

There has been significant bipartisan outcry in the face of this particular iconoclastic initiative.

Former U.S. Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.), cognizant that the memorial was built "with the sole purpose of healing the wounds of the Civil War," stressed in an August opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal that the statue's toppling would signify the desire of a "deteriorating society ... to erase the generosity of its past, in favor of bitterness and misunderstanding conjured by those who do not understand the history they seem bent on destroying."

Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) was among over 40 Republicans who criticized the iconoclastic initiative, calling on Defense Secretary Austin in a Dec. 11 letter to suspend all removal activities related to the Reconciliation Monument until Congress finalized the appropriations process for fiscal year 2024.

Clyde noted that the memorial ought to be exempt from the removal requirement because it "does not honor nor commemorate the Confederacy; the memorial commemorates reconciliation and nation unity." Additionally, "the Naming Commission's authority explicitly prohibits the desecration of grave sites."

Christmastime iconoclasm

Arlington National Cemetery announced Saturday that the monument had been fenced off and would be removed by no later than Dec. 22. All but the granite pedestal will be taken away.

The cemetery further alleged that the removal is in compliance with both the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act, and that no nearby graves or headstones would be damaged during the "deconstruction" process.

"During the deconstruction, the area around the Memorial will be protected to ensure no impact to the surrounding landscape and grave markers and to ensure the safety of visitors in and around the vicinity of the deconstruction," the cemetery indicated in a statement.

Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) plans to move the memorial to the New Market battlefield state historic park in Shenandoah Valley, reported the Military Times.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

National Cathedral swaps out Civil War-themed stained glass for civil rights-themed windows



For nearly 65 years, the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., had four Civil War-themed stained glass windows featuring Confederate Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. They were allegedly installed in hopes of ameliorating postwar tensions between North and South.

On Saturday, the nation's second-largest cathedral unveiled its civil rights-themed replacement windows, featuring faceless black protesters. They were ostensibly installed as a symbolic nod to ameliorating racial tensions.

The National Cathedral, official seat of the Episcopal Church, indicated in a statement that its four new windows "signify a new chapter in the Cathedral's historic legacy of art and architecture."

What's the background?

The neo-Gothic cathedral's original 4'x6' windows were donated by the United Daughters of the Confederacy, designed by Boston artist Wilbur H. Burnham, and installed in 1953. They depicted Jackson and Lee as pious Christians at various stages in their military and spiritual lives.

The engraved stone below the Jackson window noted that he "walked humbly before his creator," reported the Washington Post.

The stone below Lee's window stated that the prominent Episcopalian was "a Christian soldier without fear and without reproach."

The windows were reportedly installed to "foster reconciliation between parts of the nation that had been divided by the Civil War," according to the cathedral's former dean, Gary Hall.

NPR indicated that around 2015, the idea of removing Confederate symbols from the building was raised after the massacre of black Christians at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina.

In 2016, Rev. Dr. Kelly Brown Douglas, a member of the five-person task force assembled to consider the status of the windows, intimated their historical and provocative nature was not altogether cause for iconoclasm, but a talking point.

"Instead of simply taking the windows down and going on with business as usual, the Cathedral recognizes that, for now, they provide an opportunity for us to begin to write a new narrative on race and racial justice at the Cathedral and perhaps for our nation," said Douglas.

The subsequent death of a counter-protester at the 2017 "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, expedited the removal of the windows.

At the time of their removal, Rev. Randolph Marshall Hollerith, dean at the cathedral, said, "Confederate monuments, windows like ours — many of them have become symbols of racism and white supremacy, and they’ve become quite painful for brothers and sisters of this nation," reported the New York Times.

On Saturday, Hollerith said, "Simply put, these windows were offensive, and they were a barrier to the ministry of this cathedral, and they were antithetical to our call to be a House of Prayer for All People. They told a false narrative, extolling two individuals who fought to keep the institution of slavery alive in this country."

New windows

Smithsonian magazine reported that the bright new images, entitled "Now and Forever," were born of a collaboration between Kerry James Marshall and stained-glass fabricator Andrew Goldkuhle.

They depict black protesters holding signs that read "fairness," "not," "no," and "no foul play."

— (@)

Kerry James Marshall, a prolific race-focused artist from Birmingham, Alabama, designed the new windows for a symbolic fee of $18.65.

Marshall told the Washington Post in 2021 that this figure is significant because, "of course, 1865 is the end of the Civil War."

The windows will soon be accompanied by a poem by Mellon Foundation president Elizabeth Alexander, whose organization helped fund the windows' replacement. The poem, which will be engraved below the windows in the coming months, notes, "May this portal be where the light comes in."

Bible passages were read, speeches were given, and gospel music was played at the Saturday dedication. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson reportedly also marked the occasion by reading excerpts from Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

Marshall indicated that the unveiling highlighted "one instance where a change of symbolism is meant to repair a breach of America’s creation promise of liberty and justice for all, and to reinforce those ideals and aspirations embodied in the Cathedral’s structure and its mission to remind us that we can be better, and do better, than we did yesterday, today."

"I am deeply humbled, incredibly grateful, for the opportunity and hope that the things the windows propose continue to be a catalyst for the kind of transformation that the Cathedral stands for, what this nation stands for … and what I hope we all will embody and stand for and bring forward ourselves," added Marshall.

The Art Newspaper reported that the ultimate fate of the original windows, presently being stored and conserved at the cathedral, has not yet been decided.

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

Americans Call For Preserving Confederate Memorial After Pentagon Orders Removal

'Will not unite but only divide'

This Memorial Day, Remember The Courage And Forgiveness That Made America Great

When Americans sacrificed their lives in military service, it was not just to defend the United States but to uphold the natural rights associated with the nation’s founding.

Retired Rangers Warn Of ‘Whitewashing’ History After Pentagon Scrubs Confederate Names From Memorial

'About politics and the woke mission to erase history'

Projected Cost To Scrub Army Bases Of Confederate References Nearly Doubles As First Of Nine Bases Is Renamed

'Not anywhere close to what we need'

Biden Admin Scrubs Name Of Confederate Doctor Who Did ‘Groundbreaking Work To Humanize War’ From VA Facility

'Naming decisions should honor the patriotism of our veterans'

108-Year-Old Arlington National Cemetery Confederate Statue Recommended For Removal

statue will be removed from the cemetery