Last Friday’s appropriate (albeit belated) removal of the Confederate flag from in front of the South Carolina capitol building has spawned what the Wall Street Journal calls a Confederate-symbol backlash. “Cities, schools debate removing statues, renaming buildings—even relocating graves,” reads the Journal’s headline.
Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest is a popular target. The Confederate Lieutenant General later became the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. The Memphis, Tennessee, City Council voted last week to remove a Forrest statue from Health and Science Park and relocated the graves of Forrest and his wife.
The Journal says the movement has spread as far as Alaska, where Governor Bill Walker ordered the name of Confederate Lieutenant General Wade Hampton removed from a Census area.
The question of how far this movement should extend, if at all, is not easily answered. Where is the distinction between acknowledging a significant historical figure or event and a cultural expunging?
We have our own debate in West Virginia about Stonewall Jackson. The West Virginia Encyclopedia says the Lewis County native and the state’s most famous solider “dutifully went with his native state (Virginia) in 1861 and became one of General Lee’s most accomplished generals until his death in 1863.”
Though the state has embraced Jackson as one of its own, he was not a fan of its creation. Jackson biographer James I. Robertson, Jr., writes in The Encyclopedia, “Jackson repeatedly sought permission to lead a force into northwest Virginia to save his home area from being kept in the Union by federal invaders.”
According to the Stonewall Jackson Museum in Lexington, Virginia, where Jackson taught at VMI, he “did not leave behind any writings indicating how he felt about the institution of slavery,” but he did own as many as six slaves at one time.
We have at least two statues of Jackson in West Virginia—one at the courthouse square in Clarksburg and one on the state Capitol grounds. A state resort and lake bear his name, as does a Kanawha county middle school.
Gregg Suzanne McAllister, a professor at West Virginia State University and president of a group called Mothers of Diversity America, has started a petition drive to change the name of Stonewall Jackson Middle School. McAllister says in her petition preamble, “Ironically and sadly, it (the school) happens to educate the highest number of African American middle school students in the State of WV.”
It’s reasonable to be sensitive to objections of symbols with the government’s imprimatur that do not reflect the country’s fundamental principles. That’s why the Confederate flag came down. And we can even celebrate how it was accomplished.
As Fox News Digital Politics Editor Chris Stirewalt wrote, “It is particularly admirable that both sides of this struggle have shown goodwill and respect. It is a moment of true patriotic grace when the descendants of Confederate soldiers and the descendants of slaves can reach these terms on their own ‘with malice toward none and charity for all.’”
A school named for a historical figure is different from a flag that was erected a century after the Civil War as an emblem of resistance to equality. The Kanawha County school was not named for Stonewall Jackson as an act of defiance.
As we work through these issues, however, South Carolina has set a standard for reaching an end without self-destructing in the process.