Latest news with #RobertE.Lee
San Francisco Chronicle
03-07-2025
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
Confederacy group sues Georgia park for planning an exhibit on slavery and segregation
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — The Georgia chapter of a Confederacy group filed a lawsuit this week against a state park with the largest Confederate monument in the country, arguing officials broke state law by planning an exhibit on ties to slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Stone Mountain's massive carving depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson on horseback. Critics who have long pushed for changes say the monument enshrines the 'Lost Cause' mythology that romanticizes the Confederate cause as a state's rights struggle, but state law protects the carving from any changes. After police brutality spurred nationwide reckonings on racial inequality and the removal of dozens of Confederate monuments in 2020, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which oversees Stone Mountain Park, voted in 2021 to relocate Confederate flags and build a 'truth-telling' exhibit to reflect the site's role in the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan, along with the carving's segregationist roots. The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans also alleges in the lawsuit filed Tuesday that the board's decision to relocate Confederate flags from a walking trail violates Georgia law. 'When they come after the history and attempt to change everything to the present political structure, that's against the law,' said Martin O'Toole, the chapter's spokesperson. Stone Mountain Park markets itself as a family theme park and is a popular hiking spot east of Atlanta. Completed in 1972, the monument on the mountain's northern space is 190 feet (58 meters) across and 90 feet (27 meters) tall. The United Daughters of the Confederacy hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who later carved Mount Rushmore, to craft the carving in 1915. That same year, the film 'Birth of a Nation' celebrated the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which marked its comeback with a cross burning on top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night in 1915. One of the 10 parts of the planned exhibit would expound on the Ku Klux's Klan reemergence and the movie's influence on the mountain's monument. The Stone Mountain Memorial Association hired Birmingham-based Warner Museums, which specializes in civil rights installations, to design the exhibit in 2022. "The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will explore how the collective memory created by Southerners in response to the real and imagined threats to the very foundation of Southern society, the institution of slavery, by westward expansion, a destructive war, and eventual military defeat, was fertile ground for the development of the Lost Cause movement amidst the social and economic disruptions that followed," the exhibit proposal says. Other parts of the exhibit would address how the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans perpetuated the 'Lost Cause' ideology through support for monuments, education programs and racial segregation laws across the South. It would also tell stories of a small Black community that lived near the mountain after the war. Georgia's General Assembly allocated $11 million in 2023 to pay for the exhibit and renovate the park's Memorial Hall. The exhibit is not open yet. A spokesperson for the park did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The park's board in 2021 also voted to change its logo from an image of the Confederate carveout to a lake inside the park. The exhibit would 'radically revise' the park's setup, 'completely changing the emphasis of the Park and its purpose as defined by the law of the State of Georgia,' the lawsuit says. ___
Toronto Star
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Toronto Star
Confederacy group sues Georgia park for planning an exhibit on slavery and segregation
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — The Georgia chapter of a Confederacy group filed a lawsuit this week against a state park with the largest Confederate monument in the country, arguing officials broke state law by planning an exhibit on ties to slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Stone Mountain's massive carving depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson on horseback. Critics who have long pushed for changes say the monument enshrines the 'Lost Cause' mythology that romanticizes the Confederate cause as a state's rights struggle, but state law protects the carving from any changes.
Winnipeg Free Press
03-07-2025
- Politics
- Winnipeg Free Press
Confederacy group sues Georgia park for planning an exhibit on slavery and segregation
STONE MOUNTAIN, Ga. (AP) — The Georgia chapter of a Confederacy group filed a lawsuit this week against a state park with the largest Confederate monument in the country, arguing officials broke state law by planning an exhibit on ties to slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Stone Mountain's massive carving depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Thomas 'Stonewall' Jackson on horseback. Critics who have long pushed for changes say the monument enshrines the 'Lost Cause' mythology that romanticizes the Confederate cause as a state's rights struggle, but state law protects the carving from any changes. After police brutality spurred nationwide reckonings on racial inequality and the removal of dozens of Confederate monuments in 2020, the Stone Mountain Memorial Association, which oversees Stone Mountain Park, voted in 2021 to relocate Confederate flags and build a 'truth-telling' exhibit to reflect the site's role in the rebirth of the Klu Klux Klan, along with the carving's segregationist roots. The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans also alleges in the lawsuit filed Tuesday that the board's decision to relocate Confederate flags from a walking trail violates Georgia law. 'When they come after the history and attempt to change everything to the present political structure, that's against the law,' said Martin O'Toole, the chapter's spokesperson. Stone Mountain Park markets itself as a family theme park and is a popular hiking spot east of Atlanta. Completed in 1972, the monument on the mountain's northern space is 190 feet (58 meters) across and 90 feet (27 meters) tall. The United Daughters of the Confederacy hired sculptor Gutzon Borglum, who later carved Mount Rushmore, to craft the carving in 1915. That same year, the film 'Birth of a Nation' celebrated the Reconstruction-era Ku Klux Klan, which marked its comeback with a cross burning on top of Stone Mountain on Thanksgiving night in 1915. One of the 10 parts of the planned exhibit would expound on the Ku Klux's Klan reemergence and the movie's influence on the mountain's monument. The Stone Mountain Memorial Association hired Birmingham-based Warner Museums, which specializes in civil rights installations, to design the exhibit in 2022. 'The interpretive themes developed for Stone Mountain will explore how the collective memory created by Southerners in response to the real and imagined threats to the very foundation of Southern society, the institution of slavery, by westward expansion, a destructive war, and eventual military defeat, was fertile ground for the development of the Lost Cause movement amidst the social and economic disruptions that followed,' the exhibit proposal says. Other parts of the exhibit would address how the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans perpetuated the 'Lost Cause' ideology through support for monuments, education programs and racial segregation laws across the South. It would also tell stories of a small Black community that lived near the mountain after the war. Georgia's General Assembly allocated $11 million in 2023 to pay for the exhibit and renovate the park's Memorial Hall. The exhibit is not open yet. A spokesperson for the park did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The park's board in 2021 also voted to change its logo from an image of the Confederate carveout to a lake inside the park. Sons of the Confederate Veterans members have defended the carvings as honoring Confederate soldiers. The exhibit would 'radically revise' the park's setup, 'completely changing the emphasis of the Park and its purpose as defined by the law of the State of Georgia,' the lawsuit says. ___ Kramon is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Kramon on X: @charlottekramon.
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Unearthing the Deep Fascist Roots of the Unite the Right Rally
On August 11, 2017, hundreds of white supremacists carrying tiki torches mobbed the University of Virginia's campus, shouting racist and antisemitic slogans and violently attacking the students who stood up to them. The next day, the same hateful crowd rallied in a Charlottesville park that held a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee. The city of Charlottesville had recently engaged in a public debate over whether to get rid of the statue, and supposedly the white supremacists were there—summoned by a number of neo-Nazis, chief among them Richard Spencer, and a local racist troll named Jason Kessler—to defend it. Really, they had come to court attention and cause harm. They succeeded on both fronts. Their event, called Unite the Right, became national news when they swarmed the UVA campus, chanting, 'Jews will not replace us.' (This had what to do with Robert E. Lee?) It became a national tragedy when, on August 12, James Alex Fields Jr., who kept a framed photo of Hitler by his bed, rammed his car into a crowd of counterprotesters, injuring several and killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer. The biographer and essayist Deborah Baker's Charlottesville: An American Story is both an account of those two horrifying days and an intellectual history of the far right in the United States. It mixes investigative rigor—Baker must have listened to hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of archived Charlottesville City Council meetings, as well as far-right podcasts and YouTube videos—with emotional intensity and wide-ranging cultural critique. Baker reaches from Virginia's slaveholding history to the poet Ezra Pound's deluded post–World War II fascism to the misogynistic trolls of Gamergate in her quest to understand Unite the Right. The result is not merely smart but shattering. It joins the ranks of some of the best American nonfiction in recent years—Patrick Radden Keefe's Say Nothing; Sarah Schulman's Let the Record Show—as testimony to events we'd be unwise to forget. Baker's approach to her material is distinct in two ways. One is that, like Schulman but unlike many authors of researched nonfiction, she's not a reporter, and shows no deference to the norm of representing both sides. She did not interview any of the white supremacists that came to—or came from—Charlottesville. Baker saw them as tricking 'conscientious journalists into following them down rabbit holes,' or taking advantage of those who 'couldn't imagine they believed what they said they believed. [The media] thought it was a game, not a calculated strategy to spread their message.' Nor does she show a journalist's inclination to suppress her judgment. Baker writes damningly about the intellectual cowardice and inconsistency that set the stage for the city of Charlottesville's and University of Virginia's mismanagement of Unite the Right: At both the march and the rally, police not only failed to defend the counterprotesters, who were left to protect themselves against heavily armed, malevolent throngs, but, in some instances, attacked them. The author knows some of that inconsistency personally, which is the other distinctive piece of her approach. She grew up partly in Albemarle County, Virginia, where Charlottesville sits. Her father, though he came from a family of New England abolitionists, was also raised there, and he lends the book a telling moment. In 1968, when Baker was in elementary school, he published a 'thin volume' called Strike the Tent: In the Steps of Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia. In its preface, he wrote that, although his account might seem 'a bit sentimental and slanted' toward its Confederate subjects, he wanted not to glorify or redeem them, but to comprehend why it is that, as he wrote, '[w]hat men may sincerely believe they are fighting for is often unrelated to the consequences of their doing so.' Any Confederate who thought he was defending 'individual liberty and freedom' was risking his life for its opposite. Baker isn't caught in this rhetorical (or maybe emotional) trap, but she's intimately acquainted with its distinct Virginian manifestation. All over the country, Americans tell themselves romantic stories about the Confederacy, narratives in which Southern troops were scrappy underdogs who didn't care about saving slavery. Of course, this narrative has its own moral bankruptcy: Not caring about slavery is differently, not less, rotten than championing it. But Virginia's white elite, squinting backward from Lee and Stonewall Jackson to George Washington, James Madison, and Charlottesville's own Thomas Jefferson, have their own set of 'fairy tales. That the South stood for something fine and brave. That Virginia was exceptional in the same way that America, above all other nations, was [and] Virginians were a breed apart from the regular run of Americans. Finally, to be a Virginian was to live in accordance with the most exacting code of chivalry, 'for here the ideals of the nation were born.'' Because Baker knows this vision of Virginia, she can—and does—write against it. She suggests that for white Charlottesvillians, a real reckoning with history would involve not only removing Confederate statues, which the city did in 2021, but confronting the toxic effects of Virginian exceptionalism: state, city, and university authorities' refusal to admit the presence of hate; white Charlottesvillians' unwillingness to listen to Black ones; an overriding inability to react to new information. Of course, the whole country suffers from these issues. We always have. One of Charlottesville's central arguments is that the nation's refusal to reckon with history is connected to its most violent, authoritarian elements. Donald Trump, of course, is radically anti-historical. During his first term, he created a commission for 'patriotic education' in reaction to The New York Times' 1619 Project, which described the centrality of slavery to America's founding, and this March, he issued an executive order banning 'anti-American ideology,' which seems to mean any discussion of race, from exhibits at the Smithsonian museums. It is as if he believes that, by erasing racism from the historical record, he can also erase its effect on our present, though the effect he and his supporters have in mind isn't structural inequality but what they call 'wokeness'; as if, by forbidding talk of racism, he can prevent protest of it, too. Charlottesville is full of this absurd way of thinking, and Baker makes no bones about its link to fascism. Fascist movements, from Benito Mussolini's to Richard Spencer's, claim they will turn back time to an illusory past in which the dominant social order went unquestioned. Trump wants to do the same. In 2020, a Charlottesville clergyman who counterprotested the rally told Baker, 'We're in the shit. America is Charlottesville now. Everywhere is Charlottesville.' In 2025, he's more right than ever. During the two days of Unite the Right, Charlottesville, Virginia, was the place where the nation's better ideals came to die, and one of the places its dark new ideology, the one now ripping civil society and the civil service to shreds, was starts with the statues. In 2015, a Charlottesville high schooler named Zyahna Bryant launched a petition to get the city's sculptures of Lee and Jackson taken down and the parks where they stood renamed. At 15, Bryant wasn't a stranger to activism: Baker, who has a novelist's instinct for detail, writes that, after Trayvon Martin's murder three years earlier, Bryant had organized a 'protest at the federal courthouse: a twelve-year-old girl corralling ten-year-olds with popsicle stains on their shirts.' In high school, she called the city's vice mayor, Wes Bellamy, and asked him to get on board with removing the statues. He did, and Charlottesville created a special commission to examine the issue, but conversation stagnated. Baker writes that, at community forums (which she listened to after the fact), the statues' white defenders 'believed that four generations in Virginia, or a Confederate ancestor who was by Lee's side at Appomattox, or simply their childhood memories should give special weight to their testimony.' Many of the city's longtime Black residents steered clear of the debate, recognizing that in the face of such willed obliviousness, 'Silence was the only power [they] had.' And the obliviousness was intense. One white Virginian wrote to the commission that, although she agreed that the story of slavery needed telling, the statues should remain in place because she appreciated their beauty alongside the parks' blooming trees: She imagined, Baker writes, that 'these two histories might peacefully coexist, one ugly and painful, the other framed by flowers.' But not all the statues' defenders prevaricated in this way. In fact, as the commission stalled, local white supremacists—whose presence, Baker notes, was widely known, though rarely acknowledged—came out of the woodwork, so that instead of parks without Confederate statues, Charlottesville now had ones full of Confederate flag-wavers 'protecting' the bronze generals. One of Charlottesville's most impressive qualities is Baker's subtle insistence on keeping her eye on guns. She links gun culture to video game culture, to whiteness, to the Civil War. She summons the writer Tony Horwitz's argument that just as 'Americans had once appeased and abetted the Slave Power, they were now appeasing and abetting the spread of guns.' Baker excoriates a dominant culture that accepts mass shootings and armed vigilantism as part of life, that tolerates a gun lobby that bullies and railroads anyone who considers 'the proliferations of guns unsettling' or sees 'freedoms curtailed by the shadow guns cast over our lives.' In Charlottesville, after the statue debate and, of course, on the weekend of Unite the Right, this shadow was overwhelming. Baker describes armed white supremacists telling injured, unarmed counterprotesters that 'this is what you get when you get in the street,' as if their weapons gave them the right to hurt anyone in their way. Of course, those white supremacists weren't only local. The statue debate got Spencer's attention, too. A University of Virginia graduate and professional hate-monger who coined the term 'alt-right,' he was, in 2017, as Baker writes, 'openly audition[ing] for the role of Trump's brain.' He was also adopting harassment techniques he'd learned from Gamergate, the concerted threatening, stalking, and doxing of the game designer Zoë Quinn in 2014. In writing about Spencer, Baker decodes an aspect of Unite the Right that initially bewildered her. Early in Charlottesville, she writes that after the virulent antisemitism of the torch march, she 'was hard pressed to see the connection between Charlottesville's Confederate statues and Hitler Youth, between Southern white supremacy and European fascism. Which histories—whose histories—were in play?... It felt as though American and European national creeds were being remixed and weaponized in ways I couldn't wrap my mind around.' She wasn't alone in her confusion: She writes that even a Charlottesville rabbi she spoke with struggled to see why neo-Confederates hated Jews. I can relate. I'm Jewish, and a branch of my family settled in Richmond, Virginia, not long before the Civil War. One of my ancestors was conscripted into the Confederate Army, a shameful bit of family history that is part of a greater legacy of Jewish complicity with slavery: Consider the Lehman brothers, who built their fortune on plantation cotton. In my estimation, the involvement of many Jews in one of America's great sins binds us to the nation; it's proof of Jews' Americanness. We're obligated to do what we can to remediate slavery's harms. Unite the Right didn't change my mind about that. But it did make me take seriously the alt-right's belief that Jews aren't American at all. Baker takes it seriously, too. In researching the history of fascism in the United States, she came to understand that 'Jews were the glue that held the ideology of white supremacy and white nationalism together.' She traces this idea to the 1930s, when Ezra Pound, who had moved to Europe, became a fascist. Hoping to ground Mussolini's and Hitler's ideas in U.S. history in order to better promote them at home, he turned to Virginia's sage, Thomas Jefferson. He argued that Jefferson's vision was, in fact, the same as Mussolini's, and, in the 1950s, acquired a young protégé, John Kasper, who he hoped could help spread these ideas and 'give fascism an all-American face.' Kasper did so, Baker writes, by going to Charlottesville in the wake of the Brown v. Board of Education decision and arguing that Jews had put Black people up to demanding integration. Some 50 years later, Spencer took the Confederate statue debate as an excuse to do precisely the same. Baker writes that fascists like Pound, Kasper, and Spencer, looking to Hitler, argue that the 'liberal elite driving the conversations in media, business, and culture, were either Jews or in the pay of Jews, and thus hostile to a political order in which Christian white men claimed ascendancy.' This conspiracy theory allows them to reject the idea that Black Americans might achieve something on their own: Really, the Jews are behind them. It also allows them to foment grievance. Baker describes the Nazi Andrew Anglin whipping up his followers' emotions by listing their humiliations—student debt, addiction, trauma and injuries from fighting in meaningless wars—and then, to 'relieve them of their shame, [directing] their attention to the root cause of their tribulations: Jews.' Immediately after, he led them into the streets of Charlottesville. There, the alt-right mob encountered no resistance from the University of Virginia's authorities—its president, Baker writes, assumed that because Spencer was an alum, he'd abide by the university's honor code—or from Charlottesville and Virginia police. Baker draws a direct line from the city's underwhelming response to the statue debate sparked by Zyahna Bryant to its failure to prepare properly for Unite the Right, although police intelligence analysts and anti-fascist activists had given warning. The city and state governments and police chiefs just didn't want to take seriously the threat that the alt-right posed. And the Unite the Right organizers applied for, and got, a permit for their march. In the city's eyes, this entitled them to do what they liked, even as their rally turned into a violent and then murderous riot. Meanwhile, the unarmed Charlottesvillians who opposed the white supremacists received no police protection. They were accused of unlawful assembly; cops watched blankly as armed men kicked, hit, and maced them. It seems that not one trooper or officer was present when Heather Heyer was killed. Charlottesville's counterprotesters and the anti-fascists from around the region who helped them are Charlottesville's heroes. One of Baker's central subjects is Emily Gorcenski, a local data scientist who went from monitoring fascist chatter on the internet to confronting Spencer and his cronies face-to-face, bearing a storm of physical violence and anti-trans abuse. Others are members of the Charlottesville Clergy Collective, a group of Christian faith leaders who learned the techniques of nonviolent resistance in order to stand up to Unite the Right. She talks to a local arts administrator who turned into an activist after the statue debate, the founding members of Charlottesville's chapters of Black Lives Matter and Showing Up for Racial Justice, and citizen journalists who captured the riot in real time. Many of these people were both physically and morally wounded that weekend. Andy Stepanian, an activist who helped manage the counterprotesters' crisis communications, told Baker that, when he saw Heyer receiving chest compressions, it was as if his brain 'short-circuited. From that moment he lost the ability to live in the here and now. It has never returned.' All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish. Charlottesville is not a book of the here and now. It's too wide-ranging for that. In all its movement through time, through archives and forums and the intellectual history of America's ugliest movements, it seeks to locate 'the germ of the present in the past'—a mission of which Baker declares herself skeptical; maybe, she writes, it's 'just something writers tell themselves to exert control over events that are effectively beyond their control. But it was what I knew.' It's also a way of looking into the future. By linking Spencer to Pound, Baker demonstrates that American fascism is hardly newer than its Italian and German inspirations; by highlighting Pound's Jeffersonian pretensions, she reminds us of how deeply the crime of slavery affects not just the nation's founding philosophies but their later uses; and by tying the Jefferson-Pound-Spencer lineage to gamer culture, she reminds us how contemporary—how online—these problems are. Unite the Right happened through the internet. So did Trump's electoral victories. He's handed the reins of government, it seems, to alt-right activists who agitate on social media; he's letting Elon Musk, a tech billionaire who promotes far-right parties around the world and celebrated Trump's inauguration with a Nazi salute, dismantle the civil service. Charlottesville tells us how the country got here: by kowtowing to guns, by refusing to accept responsibility for racism close to home, by too many people ignoring what they don't want to see and not taking seriously what they don't want to hear. All those decisions—even, or especially, the ones that don't feel like decisions at all—create room for fascism to flourish, just as Charlottesville's white supremacists took the town's foot-dragging on removing the Lee statue as an opening to wave guns and Confederate flags in public parks. At the very end of the book, Baker challenges readers to attend closely not only to the hateful currents she investigates in chilling detail, but to the activists who resisted them in Charlottesville and continue to do so to this day. She is clear that these activists are responding to a deeply entrenched hate that preceded them and is more powerful than them—so powerful that its representatives are now in Congress and the White House. Yet these grassroots movements, she thinks, are our only hope. She writes that we must listen to them. 'We must regard them not as radicals … but as ordinary Americans standing up and fighting in a myriad of ways for what is right.' At this point, we've all got to do the same.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
These U.S. Army bases are being renamed to their Confederate names. Which forts are affected?
U.S. military bases will once again bear Confederate names. President Donald Trump is getting rid of Biden-era policies that changed the names of United States Army bases in 2021. The forts were renamed to wipe away the names of Confederate leaders who fought to keep slavery legal during the Civil War. Now, U.S. military bases will once again carry the legacies of Confederate leaders like Robert E. Lee and George Edward Pickett. The president announced the changes while visiting Fort Bragg in North Carolina on June 10 as part of the U.S. Army's 250th birthday celebrations. "We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee. We won a lot of battles out of those forts — it's no time to change," Trump said. "And I'm superstitious, you know, I like to keep it going right." However, the Army cannot reinstate the bases' former names without Congressional approval. Instead, the Army will rename the bases after different soldiers from later wars who share a surname with the once-honored Confederates, according to an Army news release. Trump announced on Tuesday, June 10, that seven additional Army bases would receive new names. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also already changed the names of two forts earlier in 2025. Altogether, nine bases are impacted. Two Army bases, Fort Bragg (formerly Fort Liberty) and Fort Benning (formerly Fort Moore), have already undergone name changes in 2025. Hegseth made those name swaps official in February and March of 2025, according to Department of Defense news releases. These are the forts that will revert to their original names, but honor the different U.S. soldiers, according to the Army news release. Fort Pickett (formerly Fort Barfoot) will be named in honor of Distinguished Service Cross recipient 1st Lt. Vernon W. Pickett, World War II. The fort was originally named after George Edward Pickett. Fort Hood (formerly Fort Cavazos) will be named in honor of Distinguished Service Cross recipient Col. Robert B. Hood, World War I. The fort was originally named after John Bell Hood. Fort Gordon (formerly Fort Eisenhower) will be named in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Master Sgt. Gary I. Gordon, Battle of Mogadishu. The fort was originally named after John Brown Gordon. Fort Lee (formerly Fort Gregg-Adams) will be named in honor of Medal of Honor recipient Pvt. Fitz Lee, Spanish-American War. The fort was originally named after Robert E. Lee Fort Polk (formerly Fort Johnson) will be named in honor of Silver Star recipient Gen. James H. Polk, World War II. The fort was originally named after Leonidas Polk. Fort Rucker (formerly Fort Novosel) will be named in honor of Distinguished Service Cross recipient Capt. Edward W. Rucker, World War I. The fort was originally named after Edmund Rucker. Fort A.P. Hill (formerly Fort Walker) will be named in honor of Medal of Honor recipients Lt. Col. Edward Hill, 1st Sgt. Robert A. Pinn and Pvt. Bruce Anderson, Civil War. The fort was originally named after Ambrose Powell Hill. The Army bases displaying names of Confederate leaders have been a highly contested topic in recent years. There have been long and complicated discussions about the existing memorials to Confederate soldiers and buildings that bear the names of Confederate leaders in the Civil War. Since George Floyd died in police custody in 2020, there have been calls to topple such symbols of a White supremacist past. In 2021, Congress passed a law that banned naming military assets after anyone who voluntarily served or held leadership in the Confederacy. The seven forts, now again in the hot seat, were first renamed in 2023 by former president Joe Biden. All names chosen in 2023 were to honor top leaders, such as President Dwight D. Eisenhower, as well as Black soldiers and women. No. The forts are all located in the South, however. The impacted bases are in Virginia, Texas, Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina and Alabama. USA TODAY contributed to this report. This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Why Trump is renaming these army bases to reinstate Confederate names
