Reply to Petition to Change Names of Stuart and Lee HS

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Reply to "Petition to Change Names of Stuart and Lee HS"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote]What is this mission to erase all memories of the civil war? It happened. Justice won, and we all learned from it.

Should we also petition that they shut down the Holocaust museum because we want to forget that too?

"Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." 
George Santayana

There is this side of history, yes.

However, I think that the fact that these schools were named after Confederate generals only when ordered to desegregate speaks volumes (I have not researched the timing of the naming, and am assuming the history explained in the petition is accurate). These schools were not named to honor the Confederate generals. They were named to signal, loudly, to black students and their parents that they were not welcome, and to deter them from attending. And it was probably at least somewhat effective. It would take a brave parent to send a black child to a school that had just been renamed after a Confederate general. I wouldn't be able to put my kid in the middle of that s*&%storm.

I don't think that aspect of history should be erased - in fact, I think it should be more widely known that so many institutions took such indirect steps to maintain segregation. But there is a difference between whitewashing history and preserving a name meant to intimidate and scare.

That might make sense if anyone was currently intimidated or scared or if the initiator of the petition was affected by any of this, but that is not the case.

+1000  This is the best post on here.  I taught at Lee High School.  It is now a hugely immigrant school.  It is very welcoming of all minorities. What matters is the environment of the school and that is what affects the students.  And it is a decent school with caring teachers and many programs.  The name Lee is way down the list of things that matter to the students there.  I don't think people should be foaming at the mouth over this stuff.  We have much more important things to discuss.  And I am no fan of the "Old South".  I am a Northerner who transplanted here.  I do think Robert E. Lee qualifies as a person who was not completely evil.  At the very least he can be recognized as a brilliant military strategist who graduated first in his class at West Point.  Lincoln admired him and had asked him to be his general.  Yes, there was slavery, but this is all a part of history and history is messy.  Maybe there is a message in all of that for all of us.  Nobody at Lee HS is whitewashing the history of Lee.  There is no intimidation or scariness at Lee HS that is resulting from the name of the school.    [/quote]

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