After a meeting that lasted for hours, the Shenandoah County school board voted early Friday morning to restore the names of three Confederate officers to schools in the district.
With the vote, the district appears to be the first in the country to return Confederate names to schools that had removed them after the summer of 2020, according to researchers at the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Initiative.
The vote rolled back a decision made four years ago, when the killing of George Floyd prompted nationwide demands for a racial reckoning. At a virtual meeting in July 2020, the summer of pandemic and protests, the board voted 5-1 to drop the names of two schools — Ashby-Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson High — that it deemed incompatible with a recently passed resolution condemning racism. The schools were renamed the next year as Honey Run and Mountain View.
You don’t disappear your history for George Floyd.
