As Black History Month nears the end of its annual commemoration, some figured President Joe Biden would announce the re-designation of Army posts named for Confederate military figures. Sounds like an easy thing to accomplish.
Statues of rebel generals, traitors all to the Union, and their reminders of the nation’s evil past are coming down monthly across America. Yet, erasing the stain of those figures who took up arms in 1861 to continue the enslavement of an entire race seems a hard task at the federal level.
It didn’t take Waukegan Unit School District 60 as long to change Thomas Jefferson and Daniel Webster middle schools to John R. Lewis and Edith M. Smith middle schools, respectively. The schools were renamed last year for the national and local civil rights leaders.
Like anything the federal government starts out to accomplish, things seem to get bogged down. Take, for instance, the law adopted in 2020 to rename military installations. President Donald Trump initially vetoed the legislation, which was later overridden by Congress in the waning days of his administration.
It established a name cloaked in bureaucratese if there ever was one: The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense That Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America.
Whew, just typing that makes one’s fingers sore and brain ache.
How about the shorter and more headline concise: The Naming Commission. The eight-member panel must by 2023 remove and rename at least 10 Army posts located in the South named for rebels who fought to keep slavery.
Unlike the Army when troops are given orders and those orders are carried out quickly, renaming the forts apparently takes years to accomplish. Then there have been those who certainly like the status quo, questioning the why of removing names that glorify the “Lost Cause.”
Trump, who opposed changing the names, saying it was a part of the “cancel culture,” was one of them. As we all know, voters canceled his stay in the White House in 2020.
There are others who resist the call to move past honoring rebel “heroes,” many who were slaveholders. Beside the Army posts, the Naming Commission also has taken to reviewing everything from ships, streets and buildings on military installations to determine if any were named to commemorate the Confederacy. The final tally could run into the thousands, some estimate.
The current posts up for renaming include: Camp Beauregard and Fort Polk in Louisiana; Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia; Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Rucker, Alabama; and Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
Residents by Fort Bragg, named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, are attached to the name. So much so, they are offering the rebel general’s cousin Edward Bragg as an alternate appellation for the home of the 82nd Airborne Division and the Army’s Special Operations Command. Some 3,000 paratroopers of the 82nd have been dispatched to Poland during the Ukrainian crisis.
Unlike Braxton Bragg — a North Carolina native considered by Civil War historians one of the South’s worst tactical generals, who also owned a Louisiana sugar cane plantation where people were enslaved — Edward Bragg rose to a be a Union general. A native of Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, who fought and led federal troops in a number of major Civil War campaigns, he later was elected to Congress and served as an ambassador to Mexico. Despite being a cousin of Braxton Bragg, the two never met on a Civil War battlefield, military historians note.
Many of the posts in the South came into being and were named for Confederate leaders during World War I or right before. Bragg, a West Point graduate, received the naming honor reportedly because of his actions during the Mexican-American War.
There’s plenty of folks to choose from to replace the Confederates whose names embrace U.S. Army posts in the South. Henry O. Flipper, the first Black graduate of West Point, could be one; others could be those who fought for civil rights, like abolitionist Frederick Douglass.
A good half-dozen Army generals from World War II could make the cut. There’s also Audie Murphy, a Texan and the most-decorated soldier of World War II.
Actually, the list could turn out to be quite lengthy. But not that long. It shouldn’t take this amount of time to expunge the traitors from the rolls of those who stood with the ideals of the Union and of Americans.
Charles Selle is a former News-Sun reporter, political editor and editor.
Twitter: @sellenews
