Massive Resistance Is Alive and Well in Shenandoah County, Virginia

In 2020 the Shenandoah County (VA) School Board voted to change the names of Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School. Stonewall Jackson was renamed Mountain View High School. The changes came on the heels of the police murder of George Floyd.

Two years later the school board is considering reversing its decision and restoring the original names. Some residents have expressed support because of the way the decision was made, but their backing of the change suggests that in 2022 they believe that children should attend schools named in honor of Confederate generals.

Stonewall Jackson High School was constructed in 1959. Schools had been named in honor of Confederate generals throughout the first half of the twentieth century, but as an example of commemoration, they were outpaced by monuments.

In the late 1950s and throughout the 1960s, however, a wave of schools throughout the South took names that honored Confederate generals and political leaders. This was not an accident.

As you can see, this uptick took place following the Supreme Court’s ruling in 1954 ordering the desegregation of public spaces, including schools. The decision to honor the Confederacy through school names was a clear example of “massive resistance” against the civil rights movement and federal intrusion into local affairs.

White Virginians also celebrated the Civil War Centennial between 1961 and 1965—a commemoration that was rooted in the Lost Cause and reflected in the textbooks used in public schools like Stonewall Jackson High School. Regardless of whether members of the school board and supporters of this name change acknowledge it, the decision as to whether to reverse the 2020 vote is not about some nostalgic view of the past.

It is about whether the generation that chose the name in the first place was justified in doing so and whether that decision is best for all the students attending Mountain View High School in 2022.

Virginia has been on the front lines of the debate about how American history is taught. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin ran a successful campaign that promised to root out educators who, he maintains, are corrupting their students with “divisive history” such as critical race theory and the 1619 Project.

As I have argued from the beginning, this is nothing more than a witch hunt designed to rally the conservative base and prevent an honest reckoning with our collective past.

That is what we are witnessing in Shenandoah County, Virginia. Let’s be clear as to what this is really about.

A decision to reverse the 2020 vote would be a vindication of the generation that attempted, through legal means and violence, to maintain a culture of white supremacy that celebrated a history of white supremacy.

If I taught history at Mountain View High School, I would begin every class with a reading of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens’s “Cornerstone Speech”:

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. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

And I have no doubt that I would be accused of being “divisive.”