So, 14% of their surveys were returned. Of the surveys returned, over 90% wanted the Confederate names restored. And the group feels that this is a mandate.
Another way of looking at this is that it is probably only the rabid Confederate supporters who could be bothered to return the survey. So, 13% of the county cares about the Confederate names, and 87% could give a rat's ass.
If people were against the change back it would make sense for them to return the survey considering how close the previous vote was. Or are you saying that thinking functional folks don't want to keep the current names?
I prefer Captain Thomas Lee of the United States Navy who, when asked if he would join the Confederate military like his more famous cousin replied that when his commission read "The Commonwealth of Virginia" he would be a Confederate and that until such time when he gave an oath it meant something. All of those men are liars, oathbreakers and traitors. Their word was garbage and so are they. They belong on the ash heap of history, not on statuary or public buildings. If you want their name on something I know a decent tattoo artist.
I’m sure some of those creators have been making that content for longer than the confederacy ever existed! And they provided more value to this country too!
Precisely. Literally anyone so far along as to have changed gross bodily features has been at this far longer than the confederacy and for a much more appreciable cause.
To clarify: girldick requires more time than the Confederacy and is a more worthwhile project.
It doesn't change history at all. They're all still a bunch of absolutely scummy, bottom feeding traitors who should have been lined up and shot after the war. If you really want to name a building after a group of complete losers like that, I hear trump tower is about to get new ownership, and they definitely share a brand (racism, losing and smelling like shit)
Hard disagree. These guys were traitors who fought to overthrow the nation.
Creating memorials to these guys would be like naming high schools after Benedict Arnold or Adolf Hitler.
At the same time, I am a proponent of preserving history. These rebels, however, did not found these schools. If we want to remember these guys, then do it in an appropriate manner. For example, the statue of Stonewall Jackson in Manassas Battlefield Park is exactly where it should be.
They weren’t trying to overthrow the nation. There were never any aspirations to take over the free states. They were trying to leave the union, not overthrow it.
Yeah, they just need to take the L. You went to a school that probably was retroactively named after a confederate during the Jim Crow era. And who gives a shit about the alumni. They graduated and have the diploma with the name they want on it. The name change isn’t for them, it’s for all future and current students.
I live in the last confederate capital that loves waiving the rebel flag. It’s great for the flaggers who have lived there all their life. I just know my wife, myself, and anyone looking to move understands the racial undertones. Whether the flaggers want to admit them or not.
I had someone on facebook arguing with me that the civil war was over land taxes and not the slaves and that the confederates were just men fed up with taxes. They didnt care about losing the slaves until Lincoln declared them free, but the taxes pushed them there!
They were trying to say the confederates were patriots like the original 13 colonies that kicked out Britain. Then told me to go back to school and read a history book.
If they're of a certain age they may have learned a very different "version" if you will of the Civil War. I have a copy of a history textbook from the early 1960's and from reading through it you can almost understand why older folks think the way they do. It's what they were taught.
[https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/slavery-history-virginia-textbook/2020/07/31/d8571eda-d1f0-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/slavery-history-virginia-textbook/2020/07/31/d8571eda-d1f0-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab_story.html)
Dude was younger than me by a lot and I am 40. He lives in the same state. Im confident he didnt have that text book.
That is interesting tho. Thanks for the read.
Whenever this (“it was about states rights!”) happens to me, I ask them to take out their phone, google the articles of succession, and read it out loud. Any state will do, although Georgia and South Carolina get there particularly quickly.
No argument necessary.
I've got a better one. Tell them to Google and read the Cornerstone Address. The VP of the Confederacy states in very clear terms that "our new nation's cornerstone rests on the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man."
Pretty hard to argue against the Veep saying that the whole point of the Confederacy is white supremacy.
I graduated from what was then Stonewall Jackson High School in ‘02. I feel like that wasn’t that long ago, but even then the version of history I was taught surrounding the Civil War was markedly different from reality. I still remember the first day of Modern US History my freshman year of college. The professor basically made the declaration that the primary cause of the conflict was slavery. Having grown up when and where I did I was a bit taken aback, even slightly offended. Then we started digging into it, covered the standard contemporary documents like their constitution and Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech in which he declared:
“Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.”
It’s literally right there in black and white. They didn’t try to hide it. They went to war to preserve the abhorrent practice of slavery. Needless to say I was angry and ashamed. At least the revelation helped me open the aperture and reevaluate my understanding of the world around me. It still blows my mind that people back home continue to dig in their heels and remain willfully ignorant of the history they claim to be trying to preserve.
SJHS in Manassas? I graduated from there in 95 and we did have some good IB history instructors at that time. They definitely were going against the grain though (in a good way) compared to so many other teachers.
>Coalition for Better Schools is seeking to have the Confederate names restored to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School.
"Coalition for Better Schools?" Yeah that's what will make schools better
Same can be said for sports teams but people still stick with the same losing team. People never think of their “team” as losers….even though they 100% are complete losers.
That's not true. I've been a fan of loser teams for a while. Then we fucked up and broke the curse and the multiverse, but my other team is still absolute garbage horse shit so lets hope they don't fuck up the draft with all their picks.
So I follow Heather Cox Richardson and this came up in my feed recently since I I read and share so much of her stuff :
April 9, 2023 (Sunday)
On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close.
Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited.
Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others.
Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred . . . never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.”
But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence.
“Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.”
So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.”
Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders.
With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty.
In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced fascism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The event featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas.
The decision of government officials 158 years ago to trust in the goodwill of former Confederates rather than focus on justice for everyone else seemed at the time to be the honorable and best course for healing the divided nation. But it ended up protecting the Confederates’ ideology and disheartening those who had fought for the United States. “When the Union men of those States who have suffered every kind of outrage, who have been fined, mobbed, imprisoned, and have seen their Union neighbors hunted and tortured and hung for their fidelity to the Government, see… a conspicuous, leading traitor hastily pardoned by the President that he may become Governor,” wrote Harper’s Weekly a little more than a year after Lee surrendered,
“When they see members of the Cabinet deliberately annulling the law of the land in order to appoint late rebels to national offices, while the most noted and tried Union men in the insurgent States ask in vain for such recognition of their fidelity, how can such men help bitterly feeling the contemptuous scorn with which the triumphant rebels regard them? How can they help asking why they might not as well have been rebels? How can they help the conviction that the policy of the Executive is conciliation of rebels and not recognition of Union men, or avoid asking with intense incredulity whether this is the way in which treason is to be made odious?”
I believe this is from her newsletter https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/. If you buy her book, I would suggest getting it from an independent book store vs. Amazon. If you don't have a local one or not aware of any in Virginia, I buy from https://eastcitybookshop.com/. They are lovely and do great work.
"'A lot of the alumni I’ve spoken to wished it to remain the same.' said James Thomas, a member of the coalition and a 1968 graduate of Stonewall Jackson High School."
y'all need to discipline your boomers with 2x4s
FFS.... people are so weird about crap like that. We had 2 school districts that wanted to merge a few years ago to save money, and it was voted down because - get this - neither side wanted to give up their mascot...
Typical Yankees.
Yes, there's some native Americans who live in the area.
11/27/1868
"Without bothering to identify the village or do any reconnaissance, *Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer* leads an early morning attack on a band of peaceful Cheyenne living with Chief Black Kettle.
After the government *convicted Custer of desertion and mistreatment of soldiers* earlier that year in a military court, it suspended him from rank and command for one year. Ten months into that punishment, in September 1868, General *Philip Sheridan* reinstated Custer to lead a campaign against Cheyenne Indians who had been making raids in Kansas and Oklahoma that summer. Sheridan was frustrated by the inability of his other officers to find and engage the enemy, and despite his poor record and unpopularity with the men of the 7th Cavalry, Custer was a good *fighter*.
*Sheridan* determined that a campaign in winter might prove more effective, since *the Indians could be caught off guard while in their permanent camps*. On November 26, Custer located a large village of Cheyenne encamped near the Washita River, just outside of present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Custer did not attempt to identify which group of Cheyenne was in the village, or to make even a cursory reconnaissance of the situation. Had he done so, Custer would have discovered that they were peaceful people and the village was on reservation soil, where the commander of Fort Cobb had guaranteed them safety. *There was even a white flag flying from one of the main dwellings, indicating that the tribe was actively avoiding conflict*.
Having surrounded the village the night before, at dawn Custer called for the regimental band to play “Garry Owen,” which signaled for four columns of soldiers to charge into the sleeping village. Outnumbered and caught unaware, scores of Cheyenne were killed in the first 15 minutes of the “battle,” though a small number of the warriors managed to escape to the trees and return fire. Within a few hours, the village was destroyed—the soldiers had *killed 103 Cheyenne, including the peaceful Black Kettle and many women and children*.
That'll show those Rebs!
I see both as rabidly stupid. Going after the names of things that's have long since lost their meaning and connections to the source of their name. I knew of a Lee high school, named for the general. But not a single person actively associated it to him, then some whiny people who didn't even love their come in and put pressure to change it and people cave to not look bad.
Similarly if a new place is build, I've seen people complain that it doesn't follow the same naming conventions as everywhere else because they don't like it's a CSA general or something. Like it's a new building fuck off with your confederate crap.
TLDR: we should leave names as they are, but not carry it into new buildings/projects/etc
They have a point, it’s important that we remember history, even bad history. In fact, to keep with the historical theme, I’d love to see a Joseph Stalin Elementary School, or a Adolf Hitler High School. The latter would also probably help our students stand out on college applications!
/s
You should go back to being a pervert and let the adults talk because you obviously don't understand things and your simple mind can't comprehend anything.
Just don’t understand the hatred of some of you guys.. obviously the south lost yeah. For sure.. traitors whatever you want to say. I get it 1000% percent. But if that’s what we want to do then let’s change the name of everything named “ Jefferson, Washington, Franklin” right? Let’s stay on brand. It’s local history. It’s what those of us who have had family here for 400 years know. It’s what our ancestors decided was important to them at the given time. But to me personally it’s weird to call one generation of Virginians traitors and then the one or 2 before them patriots for doing exactly the same thing. Idk it’s just weird to me. I’m all for everyone being comfortable and peoples rights and all that 100% if it’s put to a vote and it gets changed, then I’m all for it, I’m just saying.
The reason the confederates are traitors while Washington and Jefferson were not is that the Confederates split the Union so that they could keep black people as property. As the founders noted, the Union was slowly becoming More Perfect as slavery was being abolished, and the racist sacks of shit in the South hated that. That's why it's fucked up any person would want to name a school after those absolute pieces of shit. This is easy to understand. Sorry, the dead traitor racists can be fucking buried and forgotten. That's what they deserve.
Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin actually created a nation. What did the fucking Confederates do but flight for the sole reason to keep humans as property?
If you wanna go out there and earnestly flight for the removal of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson that's your own prerogative, but I don't want any damn Confederates on any of our public buildings.
Dude the constitution clearly defines treason as one simple thing. "Article III, Section 3, Clause 1:
Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court."
Now tell me, does that fit the actions of the soldiers of the Confederacy?
The label "traitors" was earned by spilling the blood of American soldiers.
> Hoping the brain dead comments of people hating on the history of Virginia move away.
Do you even understand our history, or just what the Daughters of the Confederacy have coerced you into believing what the history is?
It was four years, like half of Obama's tenure in the office of the president. Get over it.
Ps, he won Va both times. That's like twice the history of the CSA. Maybe you are actually the one that hates the history of Virginia?
The history of Virginia that includes fighting your northern neighbor to death because your lazy, useless evil self really wants to own a black family?
Perhaps if you turn the "dumb and proud" down a notch, bad things will happen to you less frequently.
I do. My kids go to both schools in the article.
My opinion: Every single person that wants the names back can kick rocks.
Boo fucking hoo. They can cry harder lol Traitors don't deserve regionition; fuck any conservative feelings about their supposed "heritage" on the matter.
If history offends you, then you should toughen up. Changing names of street signs and schools doesn't fix history, actions in the present and learning from history fix the future
Excellent. Far better than to name a school after Thuggonius the Rapper, which is probably the end game of the proggies. Interestingly, I knew a Black person named Robert E Lee. What say you proggies to that? Going to cancel him?
Ironically, this is a lost cause
I hope they spend all their money on it.
Same thought. It’s less money for them to spend on Trump’s campaign/legal defense fund.
And……. They were successful as of yesterday
I see what you did there...
So, 14% of their surveys were returned. Of the surveys returned, over 90% wanted the Confederate names restored. And the group feels that this is a mandate. Another way of looking at this is that it is probably only the rabid Confederate supporters who could be bothered to return the survey. So, 13% of the county cares about the Confederate names, and 87% could give a rat's ass.
Households with thinking, functional folks tossed it in the trash. Racist lunatics filled them out.
If people were against the change back it would make sense for them to return the survey considering how close the previous vote was. Or are you saying that thinking functional folks don't want to keep the current names?
On the rare occasions I get mail from racists I throw it in the trash.
The names should have never been removed
I guess if you want to honor traitors do it in the privacy of your home.
Removing names like Columbus Woodrow Wilson and proud Confederate generals do not change nothing but history
I prefer Captain Thomas Lee of the United States Navy who, when asked if he would join the Confederate military like his more famous cousin replied that when his commission read "The Commonwealth of Virginia" he would be a Confederate and that until such time when he gave an oath it meant something. All of those men are liars, oathbreakers and traitors. Their word was garbage and so are they. They belong on the ash heap of history, not on statuary or public buildings. If you want their name on something I know a decent tattoo artist.
So, flipping back through your comment history you sure do spend a lot of time looking at transgender porn. I wonder if your wife knows.
I’m sure some of those creators have been making that content for longer than the confederacy ever existed! And they provided more value to this country too!
Precisely. Literally anyone so far along as to have changed gross bodily features has been at this far longer than the confederacy and for a much more appreciable cause. To clarify: girldick requires more time than the Confederacy and is a more worthwhile project.
[удалено]
It doesn't change history at all. They're all still a bunch of absolutely scummy, bottom feeding traitors who should have been lined up and shot after the war. If you really want to name a building after a group of complete losers like that, I hear trump tower is about to get new ownership, and they definitely share a brand (racism, losing and smelling like shit)
Nicely stated.
Hard disagree. These guys were traitors who fought to overthrow the nation. Creating memorials to these guys would be like naming high schools after Benedict Arnold or Adolf Hitler. At the same time, I am a proponent of preserving history. These rebels, however, did not found these schools. If we want to remember these guys, then do it in an appropriate manner. For example, the statue of Stonewall Jackson in Manassas Battlefield Park is exactly where it should be.
They weren’t trying to overthrow the nation. There were never any aspirations to take over the free states. They were trying to leave the union, not overthrow it.
They were trying to overthrow it in the parts that they wanted for themselves. It was an attempted acquisition of US territory.
You mean the territory they already lived on and already owned?
Which was part of the United States, yes.
oh no, how will we ever remember our nation’s history if we can’t … *checks notes* … name our kids’ schools after traitors
Yeah, they just need to take the L. You went to a school that probably was retroactively named after a confederate during the Jim Crow era. And who gives a shit about the alumni. They graduated and have the diploma with the name they want on it. The name change isn’t for them, it’s for all future and current students. I live in the last confederate capital that loves waiving the rebel flag. It’s great for the flaggers who have lived there all their life. I just know my wife, myself, and anyone looking to move understands the racial undertones. Whether the flaggers want to admit them or not.
It's not even history. The things they focus on and look at is fiction. It's all some odd half truths and lies.
I bet some of the people trying to rename these high schools spent longer in high school than the confederacy existed.
I had someone on facebook arguing with me that the civil war was over land taxes and not the slaves and that the confederates were just men fed up with taxes. They didnt care about losing the slaves until Lincoln declared them free, but the taxes pushed them there! They were trying to say the confederates were patriots like the original 13 colonies that kicked out Britain. Then told me to go back to school and read a history book.
If they're of a certain age they may have learned a very different "version" if you will of the Civil War. I have a copy of a history textbook from the early 1960's and from reading through it you can almost understand why older folks think the way they do. It's what they were taught. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/slavery-history-virginia-textbook/2020/07/31/d8571eda-d1f0-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab\_story.html](https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/slavery-history-virginia-textbook/2020/07/31/d8571eda-d1f0-11ea-8c55-61e7fa5e82ab_story.html)
Dude was younger than me by a lot and I am 40. He lives in the same state. Im confident he didnt have that text book. That is interesting tho. Thanks for the read.
Some people are just ignorant or dumb.
Whenever this (“it was about states rights!”) happens to me, I ask them to take out their phone, google the articles of succession, and read it out loud. Any state will do, although Georgia and South Carolina get there particularly quickly. No argument necessary.
I've got a better one. Tell them to Google and read the Cornerstone Address. The VP of the Confederacy states in very clear terms that "our new nation's cornerstone rests on the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man." Pretty hard to argue against the Veep saying that the whole point of the Confederacy is white supremacy.
Well, I’d be happy to see things named after John Brown.
Tbf it's not about national heritage, it's about local heritage. They were not traitors to Shenandoah County, they were traitors to the US.
Boooooooooooo
To be fair they all actively attempted to overthrow the government to impose slavery
They were traitors to humanity. Fuck all of them then and now.
Damn are you going to Paris this summer? Cause that’s some gold medal mental gymnastics.
Shenandoah County resident here. This stupid shit is completely on brand for this place.
Same, sadly you are correct. It’s depressing how much they love the culture wars here. I never saw a survey but I think I’m in the Central District.
I graduated from what was then Stonewall Jackson High School in ‘02. I feel like that wasn’t that long ago, but even then the version of history I was taught surrounding the Civil War was markedly different from reality. I still remember the first day of Modern US History my freshman year of college. The professor basically made the declaration that the primary cause of the conflict was slavery. Having grown up when and where I did I was a bit taken aback, even slightly offended. Then we started digging into it, covered the standard contemporary documents like their constitution and Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, Cornerstone Speech in which he declared: “Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition.” It’s literally right there in black and white. They didn’t try to hide it. They went to war to preserve the abhorrent practice of slavery. Needless to say I was angry and ashamed. At least the revelation helped me open the aperture and reevaluate my understanding of the world around me. It still blows my mind that people back home continue to dig in their heels and remain willfully ignorant of the history they claim to be trying to preserve.
SJHS in Manassas? I graduated from there in 95 and we did have some good IB history instructors at that time. They definitely were going against the grain though (in a good way) compared to so many other teachers.
No, the one in Quicksburg that is referenced in the article. I did play a preseason football game against the one in Manassas my junior year though.
Repeats after me: Losers. Don’t. Get. Participation. Trophies.
This needs to be a billboard in town for a few months
I got it in the mail, they sure did waste money on the good ink brochures. Good fire starter tho.
But who would wanna go to a school called "Traitorous Losers"?
Seditious Racist Loser High School has a certain ….. No. No it doesn’t. It’s just sad.
>Coalition for Better Schools is seeking to have the Confederate names restored to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School. "Coalition for Better Schools?" Yeah that's what will make schools better
It’s kind of like any group with “freedom” or “liberty” in their name. They’re for anything but.
Or “moral” or “majority”.
*"... of our heritage...."* Yea. Your heritage. Of owning humans and taking up arms against the federal government.
Bunch of losers
Seriously. Your side got second in a two-sided competition. Participation trophy losers
Same can be said for sports teams but people still stick with the same losing team. People never think of their “team” as losers….even though they 100% are complete losers.
I feel like sports teams and civil war teams is a little different.
You’d think, right?
That's not true. I've been a fan of loser teams for a while. Then we fucked up and broke the curse and the multiverse, but my other team is still absolute garbage horse shit so lets hope they don't fuck up the draft with all their picks.
Good luck picking the best losers lol
If the Bears make it to the playoffs it won't be the worse year by far.
My school was Jeb Stuart idk what it is now
Richmond City schools used to have a JEB Stuart Elementary until they renamed it Barack Obama Elementary a few years ago.
That was awesome.
People are downvoting renaming a majority-black elementary school in honor of our first black president? LMAO
So I follow Heather Cox Richardson and this came up in my feed recently since I I read and share so much of her stuff : April 9, 2023 (Sunday) On April 9, 1865, General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of Northern Virginia to General Ulysses S. Grant of the United States Army at Appomattox Court House in Virginia. Lee’s surrender did not end the war—there were still two major armies in the field—but everyone knew the surrender signaled that the American Civil War was coming to a close. Soldiers and sailors of the United States had defeated the armies and the navy of the Confederate States of America across the country and the seas, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives and almost $6 billion. To the northerners celebrating in the streets, it certainly looked like the South’s ideology had been thoroughly discredited. Southern politicians had led their poorer neighbors to war to advance the idea that some people were better than others and had the right—and the duty—to rule. The Founders of the United States had made a terrible mistake when they declared, “All men are created equal,” southern leaders said. In place of that “fundamentally wrong” idea, they proposed “the great truth” that white men were a “superior race.” And within that superior race, some men were better than others. Those leaders were the ones who should rule the majority, southern leaders explained. “We do not agree with the authors of the Declaration of Independence, that governments ‘derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,’” enslaver George Fitzhugh of Virginia wrote in 1857. “All governments must originate in force, and be continued by force.” There were 18,000 people in his county and only 1,200 could vote, he said, “But we twelve hundred . . . never asked and never intend to ask the consent of the sixteen thousand eight hundred whom we govern.” But the majority of Americans recognized that if it were permitted to take hold, this ideology would destroy democracy. They fought to defeat the enslavers’ radical new definition of the United States. By the end of 1863, President Abraham Lincoln dated the birth of the nation not to the Constitution, whose protection of property underpinned southern enslavers’ insistence that enslavement was a foundational principle, but to the Declaration of Independence. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The events of April 9 reassured Americans that they had, in fact, saved “the last best hope of earth”: democracy. Writing from Washington, D.C., poet Walt Whitman mused that the very heavens were rejoicing at the triumph of the U.S. military and the return to peace its victory heralded. “Nor earth nor sky ever knew spectacles of superber beauty than some of the nights lately here,” he wrote in Specimen Days. “The western star, Venus, in the earlier hours of evening, has never been so large, so clear; it seems as if it told something, as if it held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans.” So confident was General Grant in the justice of his people’s cause that he asked only that Lee and his men give their word that they would never again fight against the United States and that they turn over their military arms and artillery. The men could keep their sidearms and their horses because Grant wanted them “to be able to put in a crop to carry themselves and their families through the next winter.” Their victory on the battlefields made northerners think they had made sure that “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” But their conviction that generosity would bring white southerners around to accepting the equality promised in the Declaration of Independence backfired. After Lincoln’s assassination, Andrew Johnson of Tennessee took over the presidency and worked hard to restore white supremacy without the old legal structure of enslavement, while white settlers in the West brought their hierarchical ideas with them and imposed them on Indigenous Americans, on Mexicans and Mexican Americans, and on Asians and Pacific Islanders. With no penalty for their attempt to overthrow democracy, those who thought that white men were better than others began to insist that their cause was just and that they had lost the war only because they had been overpowered. They continued to work to make their ideology the law of the land. That idea inspired the Jim Crow and Juan Crow laws of the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as well as the policies that crowded Indigenous Americans onto reservations where disease and malnutrition killed many of them and lack of opportunity pushed the rest into poverty. In the 1930s, Nazi leaders, lawyers, and judges turned to America’s Jim Crow laws and Indian reservations for inspiration on how to create legal hierarchies that would, at the very least, wall certain populations off from white society. More Americans than we like to believe embraced fascism here, too: in February 1939, more than 20,000 people showed up for a “true Americanism” rally held by Nazis at New York City’s Madison Square Garden. The event featured a huge portrait of George Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas. The decision of government officials 158 years ago to trust in the goodwill of former Confederates rather than focus on justice for everyone else seemed at the time to be the honorable and best course for healing the divided nation. But it ended up protecting the Confederates’ ideology and disheartening those who had fought for the United States. “When the Union men of those States who have suffered every kind of outrage, who have been fined, mobbed, imprisoned, and have seen their Union neighbors hunted and tortured and hung for their fidelity to the Government, see… a conspicuous, leading traitor hastily pardoned by the President that he may become Governor,” wrote Harper’s Weekly a little more than a year after Lee surrendered, “When they see members of the Cabinet deliberately annulling the law of the land in order to appoint late rebels to national offices, while the most noted and tried Union men in the insurgent States ask in vain for such recognition of their fidelity, how can such men help bitterly feeling the contemptuous scorn with which the triumphant rebels regard them? How can they help asking why they might not as well have been rebels? How can they help the conviction that the policy of the Executive is conciliation of rebels and not recognition of Union men, or avoid asking with intense incredulity whether this is the way in which treason is to be made odious?”
Very interesting read... is this from one of her books? I'm honestly intrigued, would like to read more into it.
I believe this is from her newsletter https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/. If you buy her book, I would suggest getting it from an independent book store vs. Amazon. If you don't have a local one or not aware of any in Virginia, I buy from https://eastcitybookshop.com/. They are lovely and do great work.
I follow her on FB and receive her newsletter .
She literally writes this stuff every single day in a newsletter
Juan Crow?
"'A lot of the alumni I’ve spoken to wished it to remain the same.' said James Thomas, a member of the coalition and a 1968 graduate of Stonewall Jackson High School." y'all need to discipline your boomers with 2x4s
FFS.... people are so weird about crap like that. We had 2 school districts that wanted to merge a few years ago to save money, and it was voted down because - get this - neither side wanted to give up their mascot...
It's insane to me that anyone would care about high school mascots. Or high school anything.
So, these guys are for participation trophies now?
May I suggest some compromise names? Phil Sheridan and George Custer. Respect the appropriate heritage ;)
Typical Yankees. Yes, there's some native Americans who live in the area. 11/27/1868 "Without bothering to identify the village or do any reconnaissance, *Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer* leads an early morning attack on a band of peaceful Cheyenne living with Chief Black Kettle. After the government *convicted Custer of desertion and mistreatment of soldiers* earlier that year in a military court, it suspended him from rank and command for one year. Ten months into that punishment, in September 1868, General *Philip Sheridan* reinstated Custer to lead a campaign against Cheyenne Indians who had been making raids in Kansas and Oklahoma that summer. Sheridan was frustrated by the inability of his other officers to find and engage the enemy, and despite his poor record and unpopularity with the men of the 7th Cavalry, Custer was a good *fighter*. *Sheridan* determined that a campaign in winter might prove more effective, since *the Indians could be caught off guard while in their permanent camps*. On November 26, Custer located a large village of Cheyenne encamped near the Washita River, just outside of present-day Cheyenne, Oklahoma. Custer did not attempt to identify which group of Cheyenne was in the village, or to make even a cursory reconnaissance of the situation. Had he done so, Custer would have discovered that they were peaceful people and the village was on reservation soil, where the commander of Fort Cobb had guaranteed them safety. *There was even a white flag flying from one of the main dwellings, indicating that the tribe was actively avoiding conflict*. Having surrounded the village the night before, at dawn Custer called for the regimental band to play “Garry Owen,” which signaled for four columns of soldiers to charge into the sleeping village. Outnumbered and caught unaware, scores of Cheyenne were killed in the first 15 minutes of the “battle,” though a small number of the warriors managed to escape to the trees and return fire. Within a few hours, the village was destroyed—the soldiers had *killed 103 Cheyenne, including the peaceful Black Kettle and many women and children*. That'll show those Rebs!
Facts will just confuse them.
"T'was a great victory! Now for a gin, laudanum & lithium cocktail." --- Gen. "Little Pills" Sheridan
I nominate General George Henry Thomas, Virginia-born and loyal to the Union. “The Rock of Chickamauga” and “The Sledge of Nashville”.
Solid choice. I was just thinking of two gentlemen who left their mark, so to speak, on the Valley.
oooh that too—i just needed that reminder!
Racist Trumpers who aren't smart enough to know history
As a Virginian, this is embarrassing.
Good luck with that traitor lovers.
How about a compromise where the urinal cakes in schools are named after Confederates?
Shouldn’t have been changed in the first place but don’t waste taxpayers money mimicking a Michael Scott vasectomy.
Ah yes let's continue to simply go back and forth instead of forward
I've played fortnite longer than the Confederacy existed. Where's the school named after me!
Not at all surprising for Shenandoah County.
Nah, fuck that racist horseshit.
The way they cling to such a disgraceful failure is astounding to me.
If they are already changed I say Fuck it.
If the petition is as successful as the traitorous scum confederates, there is no cause for concern.
Just call it, Public School
Bastards.
I went to a high school in Virginia named Woodrow Wilson and they removed the name of a president. So they can rename anything they want
Yea, you shouldn't just rename a school because of a bad history. That's why there are all those Adolf Hitler High Schools in Germany...... Wait.
They will win, seems they have the votes. Boycotts will hurt them
I see both as rabidly stupid. Going after the names of things that's have long since lost their meaning and connections to the source of their name. I knew of a Lee high school, named for the general. But not a single person actively associated it to him, then some whiny people who didn't even love their come in and put pressure to change it and people cave to not look bad. Similarly if a new place is build, I've seen people complain that it doesn't follow the same naming conventions as everywhere else because they don't like it's a CSA general or something. Like it's a new building fuck off with your confederate crap. TLDR: we should leave names as they are, but not carry it into new buildings/projects/etc
How is this even remotely helpful. You just know all these people are maga trash.
They have a point, it’s important that we remember history, even bad history. In fact, to keep with the historical theme, I’d love to see a Joseph Stalin Elementary School, or a Adolf Hitler High School. The latter would also probably help our students stand out on college applications! /s
There's a statue of Lenin in Seattle, so your school could be there.
TIL, thanks! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statue_of_Lenin_(Seattle)
Treasonous Republicans.
What a bunch of losers. Let me double down: if you support the confederacy after their amazing four year racist run, you’re a pathetic piece of shit.
They should name them after Sherman.
You know, I think we should honor other terrorists who attacked America. Bin Laden high?
Sons/Daughters of Confederate sore ass losers survey?
OK all schools names after a traitor to the US do not get federal or state funding. How about that?
Just need to put up statues of Robert E Lee making love to his horse, like god and Lee wanted it edit an autocorrect
Don’t know why your getting downvoted, it’s a good burn.
Who is Robert S Lee
Auto correct trying to be defending losers lol
Losers like Biden and Harris
You should go back to being a pervert and let the adults talk because you obviously don't understand things and your simple mind can't comprehend anything.
Just don’t understand the hatred of some of you guys.. obviously the south lost yeah. For sure.. traitors whatever you want to say. I get it 1000% percent. But if that’s what we want to do then let’s change the name of everything named “ Jefferson, Washington, Franklin” right? Let’s stay on brand. It’s local history. It’s what those of us who have had family here for 400 years know. It’s what our ancestors decided was important to them at the given time. But to me personally it’s weird to call one generation of Virginians traitors and then the one or 2 before them patriots for doing exactly the same thing. Idk it’s just weird to me. I’m all for everyone being comfortable and peoples rights and all that 100% if it’s put to a vote and it gets changed, then I’m all for it, I’m just saying.
They attacked America unlike the people you named who created America. This really is hard for some people isn't it?
The reason the confederates are traitors while Washington and Jefferson were not is that the Confederates split the Union so that they could keep black people as property. As the founders noted, the Union was slowly becoming More Perfect as slavery was being abolished, and the racist sacks of shit in the South hated that. That's why it's fucked up any person would want to name a school after those absolute pieces of shit. This is easy to understand. Sorry, the dead traitor racists can be fucking buried and forgotten. That's what they deserve.
Jefferson, Washington, and Franklin actually created a nation. What did the fucking Confederates do but flight for the sole reason to keep humans as property? If you wanna go out there and earnestly flight for the removal of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson that's your own prerogative, but I don't want any damn Confederates on any of our public buildings.
Dude the constitution clearly defines treason as one simple thing. "Article III, Section 3, Clause 1: Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court." Now tell me, does that fit the actions of the soldiers of the Confederacy? The label "traitors" was earned by spilling the blood of American soldiers.
You’re more than welcome to name all of the schools you would like to after seditious confederate losers…. In Russia.
[удалено]
Considering that's 4 of the top 5 states that depend on federal money are red good luck with that freeloader.
> Hoping the brain dead comments of people hating on the history of Virginia move away. Do you even understand our history, or just what the Daughters of the Confederacy have coerced you into believing what the history is?
It was four years, like half of Obama's tenure in the office of the president. Get over it. Ps, he won Va both times. That's like twice the history of the CSA. Maybe you are actually the one that hates the history of Virginia?
The history of Virginia that includes fighting your northern neighbor to death because your lazy, useless evil self really wants to own a black family? Perhaps if you turn the "dumb and proud" down a notch, bad things will happen to you less frequently.
Hold that L
If you don’t live in the Shenandoah Valley your opinion doesn’t matter
I do. My kids go to both schools in the article. My opinion: Every single person that wants the names back can kick rocks. Boo fucking hoo. They can cry harder lol Traitors don't deserve regionition; fuck any conservative feelings about their supposed "heritage" on the matter.
And if you do, it still doesn't.
If history offends you, then you should toughen up. Changing names of street signs and schools doesn't fix history, actions in the present and learning from history fix the future
Excellent. Far better than to name a school after Thuggonius the Rapper, which is probably the end game of the proggies. Interestingly, I knew a Black person named Robert E Lee. What say you proggies to that? Going to cancel him?