OPINION: In Virginia, these Confederate names have a power of their own.

Editor’s note: Nicole Hemmer is an associate professor of history and director of the Carolyn T. Rogers and Robert M. Rogers Center for Presidential Studies at Vanderbilt University.she is the author of “Partisans: The conservative revolutionaries who reshaped American politics in the 1990s” I co-host the podcast. ”past present” and “This day in arcane political history” The views expressed in this comment are her own.view more opinions On CNN.

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In 2020, the Shenandoah County, Virginia, School Board joined hundreds of other educational institutions across the country in renaming two schools to disassociate them from Confederate leaders and slave labor. Stonewall Jackson High School became Mountain View, and Ashby Lee Elementary School (named for Confederate generals Turner Ashby and Robert E. Lee) became Honey Run.

Late last week, the district became the first in the nation to reverse such a name change.

School board members who voted in favor of the change said they did so because the original name change was part of a “surprise reaction” to the 2020 protests. One board member said those who voted to remove the Confederate name “exploited the tragedy of the coronavirus” to push the decision through without full public input.

The reversal of America’s racist past and present has progressed at an alarming speed in recent years. Corporations are cutting funding for diversity and inclusion efforts, and Republican state governments are forcing universities to downsize or eliminate their diversity and inclusion offices. Books by black authors have been banned in dozens of schools, and some school districts have banned teachers from mentioning systemic racism.

With these policies in mind, renaming these two schools may not seem like a big deal. But in restoring the Confederate name, the school board signaled that the politics of relief were back in full force, and that no part of the past decade’s liquidation would go unchallenged.

Honoring Jackson and Lee is an act of Confederate nostalgia wherever it is performed. But in Virginia, the act’s political value is particularly acute. Stonewall Jackson High School opened as a whites-only school in 1959, in defiance of the Supreme Court’s decision five years earlier in Brown v. Board of Education that single-sex education was unconstitutional. With Brown celebrating its 70th anniversary this week, school boards across Virginia are routinely choosing to close schools entirely rather than open them to black students. Slapping Jackson’s name on the all-white school sent a clear message about who the school was for, even after the first black students enrolled years later.

Twenty-five years later, when the federal government established Martin Luther King Jr. Day, white Virginians turned their attention to Jackson and then Lee again. Instead of honoring Dr. King with a separate holiday (the state had commemorated Dr. King on New Year’s Day since 1978), the state legislature gave Lee and Jackson, who had been given a joint state holiday since 1904, a memorial to Dr. King. I have summarized. King Day, America’s most incongruous holiday, was born.

The irony of putting two black civil rights leaders and Confederate slave laborers together became too much to bear by 2000, when the state separated the holiday. In 2020, the state legislature abolished Lee Jackson Day altogether after several local governments stopped observing it as a holiday.

The memory of Lee and Jackson has played an equally important role in recent efforts to promote (and violently resist) racial reconciliation in Virginia. In the middle of his two city parks in downtown Charlottesville, Virginia, white townspeople have erected monuments since the 1920s, with the support of the Ku Klux Klan, as part of a terrorist campaign against the city’s black residents. Statues of both men have stood there ever since it was built.

The year before Shenandoah County opened Stonewall Jackson High School in 1959, Virginia’s governor ordered two schools in Charlottesville to close rather than desegregate. When the school reopened in February 1959 under a court order, nearly a third of her white students went on to segregated private schools.

Nearly a century after Confederate statues were installed in Charlottesville, the Charlottesville City Council removed the Lee and Jackson statues in February 2017 in response to a petition created by then-15-year-old Gina Bryant. , resolved to rename the park. . Robert E. Lee Park became Emancipation Park. Stonewall Jackson Park became Justice Park.

What happened next was an orgy of racism and violence that shocked most Americans. In the months that followed, neo-Nazis, neo-Confederates, and Klan members marched through the city several times, beginning with a torchlight attack on anti-racism activists at the University of Virginia and ending with a car attack that killed Heather Heyer. It culminated in a racist rally. and injured many other anti-racism demonstrators. The violence and a series of lawsuits left the statue in place until 2021, when the Supreme Court ruled that a state law banning the removal of war memorials did not apply to the Charlottesville statue. Late last year, the Lee statue was taken to a foundry and melted down.

The fight over the name of a Charlottesville park and the fate of a statue was deeply intertwined with policy debates over fair housing, equal access to education, and income inequality. What might be dismissed as symbolic politics was actually deeply rooted in a broader policy vision. That’s because these markers on the landscape reflect the vision of people and politics that a community wants to pursue.

Such was the case in 1924 when statues were erected to display white power. Such was the case in 2017 when the park was renamed after Liberation and Justice. It’s true that in 2018, a frightened City Council renamed the park again, this time to make it as anodyne as possible (the park is now called Market Street and Court Square).

Years later, in Richmond, Virginia, the city’s Robert E. Lee statue became the site of protests and reclamation. After police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis, demonstrators gathered at the Lee statue and turned it into a symbol of resistance, tagging it with slogans calling for equal rights, justice and police accountability.

At night, images of Floyd and black freedom leaders were projected onto the memorial. Finally, the statue was taken down and moved to the Virginia Black History Museum and Cultural Center.

We minimize all these changes at our peril. Names are important because they indicate who we honor and how we envision our community. They tell us something about those in power at the local level and how they plan to use it.

The Shenandoah County Board of Education knows this. That’s why they brought back the Jackson and Lee names. They chose to name the school Confederate in order to revive the celebration of enslavement, rebellion, and white supremacy that was at the heart of anything honoring the Confederate general. In doing so, they provided a stark reminder that the process of racial justice redress is well underway in the United States and is steadily gaining strength and confidence.