The Washington Post reports that there is broad agreement in the Washington and Lee University community that “Lee” needs to be dropped from the school’s name. As anyone who visits the Virginia university knows, set on its leafy grounds is a shrine to the Confederate commander and Reconstruction Era college president. According to the Post:
And 2,000 alumni have joined a group calling for the name to change, according to a leader of a coalition formed on social media.
The private college in Virginia, named in honor of two of its early benefactors, George Washington and Lee, has particularly deep and complex ties to the Confederacy. Lee’s tomb, a place of pilgrimage for some who venerate that cause, is on the campus.
Over the years, school officials have taken steps to change the way Lee’s contributions are remembered, such as emphasizing his role as an educator and removing Confederate flags. After violence in Charlottesville was ignited by the dispute over a monument to Lee, the university’s president called for a thorough examination of the institution’s history. That commission recommended numerous changes, including the way that history would be taught and shared, but did not call for the school’s name to be changed….
Chase Calhoun, a senior from Atlanta who is student body president, said they have been having many difficult conversations recently, about how the constant reminders of Lee’s legacy. On Thursday morning he read the statements to the board of trustees, telling them the executive committee of the student body had concluded that they could no longer remain silent on this issue.
After listening to discussions in recent weeks, they wrote, “it is clear Robert E. Lee’s enduring legacy on our campus and in our university’s name serves as a constant reminder for many, especially Black students and other students of color, of the racial oppression he fought to preserve and which has persisted throughout the history of our nation.”
As representatives of the student body, they wrote, they could not ignore students affected “most personally on a daily basis by the glorification of Robert E. Lee at Washington and Lee University. The call for the removal of Lee from our institutional name is not a call to erase our history, but rather a call to end the exaltation of a figure representative of values incongruous with the values of our university.”
We have come to see your university several times over the years and do not think that it should be name changed. We are as a family united in this request. Our nation has had enough of what is going on in the good old USA, and another comes into of what our beloved country is founded on. In the name of GOD please stand up for our country because it is being taken over by a very radical movement. We are united in what our country was founded on. Please, please take a stand.