Federal Court: Confederate Names “Cannot Be Divorced From Racial Discrimination”

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia ordered the Shenandoah County School Board to remove Confederate school names, ruling that the board's decision to rename two schools after Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Turner Ashby in 2024 "cannot be divorced from racial discrimination."

"Lee, Jackson, and Ashby fought to preserve a political system that enslaved Blacks, and their legacy was used as a tool to fight school desegregation," the court wrote.

In 2020, the school board recognized that the names were racially divisive and had a discriminatory impact on Black students and removed the names from their schools.

But in 2024, the school board voted to reinstate the Confederate names.

Shenandoah County students challenged that decision in federal court, arguing that the decision was racially discriminatory and therefore violated their rights under the Fourteenth Amendment as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, federal laws that prohibit racial discrimination in education.

After holding a five-day evidentiary hearing and considering briefs and arguments, the federal court ruled in favor of the student plaintiffs.

"The Confederate names were restored with complete awareness of their historic legacy and ongoing discriminatory impact," the district court wrote in a 141-page opinion issued last week. Accordingly, the vote to reinstate the names "necessarily embraces the ideals for which Lee, Jackson, and Ashby fought-including the enslavement of Black people-an ideology patently inconsistent with the letter and spirit of the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Act of 1964."

The Truth About Confederate-Named Schools

Historically, the practice of naming schools to honor the architects and defenders of slavery has been part of a broader effort to maintain racial hierarchy in the U.S.

Many schools were given Confederate-themed names in the 1950s and 1960s as Southern states mounted what they termed "Massive Resistance," a coordinated effort by governors, legislators, and other white leaders to prevent the racial integration of public schools that was required by the Supreme Court's 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

As federal law increasingly required school desegregation, white communities built new schools-schools that were either explicitly or implicitly intended for white children only-and named those schools after white Southerners who were notorious racists.

Well into the 21st century, many Black children have been forced to attend public schools named after people who enslaved and trafficked their Black ancestors.

"Massive Resistance" in Shenandoah County

Since they first opened in 1870, Shenandoah County public schools were racially segregated and egregiously unequal, according to expert testimony credited by the court. Schools for Black children were less likely to have indoor plumbing or cafeterias, Black teachers were paid less to teach much larger classes, and Black students often had to make do with secondhand textbooks and supplies.

Worst, although the county operated several high schools for white students, there was no high school for Black students, who had to take buses several miles and hours away to attend segregated high schools in other districts.

Shenandoah County (which is about 90% white) strongly opposed Brown-and its schools remained segregated until 1963, nearly a decade later.

During this period, the school board built three new high schools for white students, including Stonewall Jackson High School. Built between 1957 and 1959-while a Confederate battle flag flew over the construction site-the school's name was chosen to promote Massive Resistance and "for the purpose of racial discrimination, discouraging Black students from seeking admission," the court found.

Similarly, even though it admitted Black students when it opened in 1974, the evidence showed that Ashby-Lee Elementary School was named for Confederate General Robert E. Lee and Confederate officer Turner Ashby at least in part to express opposition to federally mandated school integration and to discourage Black families from attending the school.

Addressing a History of Racial Injustice

In the summer of 2020, Virginia Secretary of Education Atif Qarni and Gov. Ralph Northam called on local elected officials to remove Confederate school names, citing their traumatizing impact on children, families, teachers, and staff of color.

On June 25, 2020, the Shenandoah County School Board unanimously passed a "Resolution condemning racism and affirming the division's commitment to an inclusive school environment for all," in which it committed "to foster an inclusive educational environment where every student, teacher, support professional, parent and community member is treated with dignity and respect."

On July 9, 2020, after hearing public comments from some 25 speakers, the school board voted 5-1 to remove the Stonewall Jackson and Ashby-Lee school names.

School board members acknowledged at the time that, as the court put it, "the names symbolize hatred and were a symbolic reference to a time of inequality and racism" and said they voted to remove the names in order to make schools more welcoming to everyone.

After that decision was reaffirmed on September 10, 2020, new names were chosen and on January 14, 2021, Stonewall Jackson High School became Mountain View and Ashby-Lee Elementary became Honey Run.

Embracing Racial Discrimination in 2024

In November 2021, three new school board members who were backed by supporters of restoring the Confederate names were elected. At a school board meeting on June 9, 2022, one of the new members made a motion to restore the Confederate names. The board heard public comment from over 40 people before voting on the motion. The vote was 3-3 and the motion failed.

In November 2023, three new school board members who campaigned on restoring the Confederate names were elected. Groups including the Virginia State Conference of the NAACP called on the board to retain the new names, and the majority of more than three hours of public comments were opposed to restoring the Confederate names, the court found.

But on May 9, 2024, the board nonetheless voted 5-1 to rename the schools for Confederates.

School board members cited concerns about the process for changing the names in 2020 as the reason for their vote-a justification the court rejected because it ignores the intervening, unobjectionable process in 2022, when a motion to reinstate the Confederate names failed after significant public comment and participation.

The court found it was not credible that process concerns were the sole reason for the board's decision in 2024. Instead, the evidence established that race and racial discrimination were motivating factors in restoring the Confederate names.

"[T]he real issue in 2024 was not how the Confederate names were retired in 2020," the court found, "but rather was the fact that they were changed at all."

Relief Granted to Community Members and Students

The Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits racial discrimination in public education because, as the Supreme Court explained in Brown, it "generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone."

In its August 6 opinion, the court held that the four Black student plaintiffs presented compelling and convincing evidence of illegal racial discrimination.^{1 The court ruled last year that Stonewall Jackson High School students' First Amendment rights were violated when student athletes were forced to serve as "mobile billboards" by displaying the "Generals" name on their uniforms.}

"One after another, students presented heartfelt and unwavering testimony, describing how Confederate school names make them feel unwelcome, devalued and ultimately inferior to their white peers," Kaitlin Banner, deputy legal director at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in a statement.

After a thorough review of the extensive evidence, the district court concluded that the 2024 decision to reinstate Confederate school names "imposes a disproportionate burden on Black students in Shenandoah County by subjecting them to race-based educational, psychological, and dignitary harms that their White peers do not bear."

This discriminatory impact on Black students was a main reason why the school board voted in 2020 to remove the Confederate names-and the court found that no new evidence refuted that conclusion.

"With the School Board's 2020 recognition that Confederate names have a discriminatory effect unimpeached," the court reasoned, "this swift reversal of course indicates that the School Board acted in 2024 with the opposite intent with which it acted in 2020-the intent to reinstate the discriminatory effect."

The extraordinary sequence of events in Shenandoah County leading up to the reinstatement of the Confederate school names supports a finding that race discrimination was a motivating factor in the decision, recognizing the reality that the School Board's actions in 2024 were taken in direct response to the School Board's decision in 2020 to advance racial equity in the schools-much like the original namings were a backlash to Brown v. Board of Education and public school desegregation.

"The historical record is clear that the Shenandoah County School Board named their newly-constructed high school after Stonewall Jackson in 1959 in furtherance of Massive Resistance to desegregation," the court wrote. "Though Black students are no longer literally excluded from public schools, to them the choice to resurrect a Confederate name in 2024 invokes the same message of exclusion that the name carried when it was first given to the school."

The court further found that the school board violated the Equal Education Opportunities Act, which required that it affirmatively act to remove vestiges of its segregated school district, when the board- "with complete awareness of their historic legacy and ongoing discriminatory impact"-did not remove but instead "revived symbols of the Massive Resistance movement, and with it, the exclusionary messaging and harms associated with the dual school system."

"[I]n this case, the School Board did not simply fail to take affirmative steps to remove the vestiges of a dual school system," the court concluded. "Rather, in acting to restore such a vestige, it took a step in the other direction."

In order to "eliminate the vestiges of segregation embedded in Shenandoah County's public school system and to ensure that all students are afforded equal protection of the laws and equal educational opportunity," the court ordered the school board to remove and cease use of the Confederate school names, and to adopt new school names "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed."

Defense lawyer Jim Guynn told The New York Times last week that he plans to appeal.