The Week in Confederate Heritage

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We begin in Lexington, VA, with this article, telling us, “On Friday W&L announced that it would retain its name after a yearlong deliberative process within the university community. The name-change discussion arose following the national reckoning last summer ignited by the murder of George Floyd and the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. The protests over needless killings of Black citizens during police stops for minor offenses evolved to calls for removing monuments honoring Confederate figures, with the most prominent being Robert E. Lee. Washington and Lee, where Lee served as president for five years following the Civil War, may be the ultimate monument to Lee. Three days before the Washington and Lee announcement, a special investigative team from the law firm Barnes and Thornburg released its final report into the climate and culture at VMI, especially with regard to race and gender. The investigation was ordered last fall by state leaders, including Governor Ralph Northam, an alumnus of the institute, following an article in The Washington Post alleging an ingrained culture hostile to both women and students of color. I have followed both stories with more than casual interest. My students regularly attend both colleges, and I have been thinking about respected friends in both admission offices. Admission loosely translates as ‘to the mission,’ but admission offices have to market not only an institution’s mission or aspirations, but also its unique personality and campus culture, both strengths and flaws. Both W&L and VMI are steeped in a proud history, and both have to come to grips with those histories at a time when social norms and attitudes are changing dramatically.”

The article says, “For Washington and Lee, that history is captured in its name. The university’s association with both George Washington and Robert E. Lee is not honorary but ‘specific,’ according to the Board of Trustees’ ‘Message to the Community’ posted on June 4. What had been Liberty Hall Academy was renamed for Washington in 1796 after he made a financial gift that enabled its survival. Lee’s name was added in 1870 after his death while serving as president, credited with ‘saving and transforming the school after the devastation of the Civil War.’ W&L has reveled in its association with Lee ever since, but how should it respond in a time when he has become a divisive figure? Earlier this year, the faculty voted 188 to 51 to change the name, whereas alumni tended to oppose the change. The board voted 22 to 6 to keep the name but removed Lee’s name from the chapel and decided to physically separate its main auditorium from the Lee family crypt (Lee is buried at W&L, as is his horse, Traveller). It also committed the university to expand its diversity and inclusion initiatives while expressing regret over ‘the university’s past veneration of the Confederacy and its role in perpetuating ‘The Lost Cause’ myths that sustained racism.’ That didn’t satisfy critics, including a faculty member who on Twitter accused the board of being ‘more afraid of being called woke than racist.’ Is that criticism fair? Confederate ‘heroes’ are overrepresented when it comes to statues and namings, providing a counterpoint to the adage that history is written by winners. I didn’t grow up in the South, so I don’t get the worship and veneration of figures like Lee, but the attempt to turn Lee into a 19th-century Mike Flynn seems false. Can we acknowledge our history, even the ugly warts, without celebrating it? Must we obliterate any mention of figures like Lee, or can we judge them in context? If any place has a legitimate reason to retain Lee in its name, it’s W&L. I recognize that my perspective is clouded by the fact that I am a white male, and that others see the issue differently. In a time where there is political and cultural division, I struggle to find a rational middle ground, even as I know there are critics who argue that rationality is a form of white supremacy. I’m sorry, but I’m not willing to concede that point. My real question is whether W&L’s decision to hold on to the Lee name may hurt its ability to attract the diverse applicants required to be the national liberal arts college it aspires and deserves to be. Washington and Lee has an opportunity, fraught with danger, to take Lee’s emphasis on civility (captured in its “speaking tradition”) and honor and to build on those values with a 21st-century commitment to being a college that is traditional but also diverse, inclusive and forward-looking. Is retaining Lee’s name an impediment to that?”

The article continues, “Washington and Lee’s neighbor, Virginia Military Institute, is dealing with its own challenges with regard to its past and its resistance to change. Founded in 1839, VMI is the nation’s oldest state-supported military college, and it has a proud history of producing citizen soldiers and leaders. Its graduates possess a loyalty perhaps unmatched by any other college, and it provides needed diversity within the landscape of American higher education. The external review of VMI’s culture and climate came about after a Washington Post article reported that Black cadets find themselves in an environment where not only is there continuing veneration of the institute’s Confederate history but also racial insensitivity that extends to racial slurs and even references to lynching. Other articles alleged differential treatment of minority students by VMI’s single-sanction honor system. The Barnes and Thornburg report begins by describing VMI as traditionally ‘run by white men, for white men.’ It describes a culture resistant to changing practices and traditions that lack sensitivity to minority and female students. It also finds that neither the honor system nor the ‘rat line,’ VMI’s two most distinctive and beloved traditions, are responsible for any of the racial or gender issues on Post, VMI’s name for its campus. The report tells a story that is far more nuanced than the newspaper articles suggest. Like W&L’s, VMI’s culture is closely tied to its association with a major Confederate figure. Stonewall Jackson, the legendary Confederate general who died from friendly fire at the Battle of Chancellorsville (and whose arm is buried in a different location from the rest of him), was a professor at VMI, a charismatic figure who inspired loyalty from followers who were willing to overlook the fact that he was probably more than a little crazy (fortunately, that would never happen today). Until recently, fourth-class students were required to salute a statue of Jackson. The Corps of Keydets also fought and lost 10 members in the Battle of New Market, and until recently VMI students took the Cadet Oath on that battlefield. The report alludes to a more fundamental issue that’s not unique to VMI but found on many campuses — a debate about the essence of an institution. Nearly 20 years ago, I served on a three-person team charged with evaluating VMI’s admissions and financial aid offices. It was fascinating to spend three days on Post, and our report concluded that VMI needed to work hard to overcome unique challenges in recruiting both women and underrepresented minorities. One of the interesting things we learned was that everyone at VMI had a clear vision of what the essence of the institute was. The only problem was that those visions, while clear, didn’t coincide. The military people asserted that VMI was first and foremost a military school, the faculty believed that VMI was primarily an academic institution, and the athletic administrators and coaches argued that VMI had made a primary commitment to be a Division I athletic school. The Barnes and Thornburg report suggests that identity crisis still exists and plays into the culture issues that have brought attention to VMI. The report suggests that the real tension at VMI is between athletes and nonathletes. Nonathletes believe that athletes don’t buy in to the full VMI experience and resent that they are excused from many of the disagreeable parts of the experience. Where this crosses into race is a tendency among many associated with VMI to believe that all minority students at VMI are athletes.”

The article concludes, “The issues facing both colleges make Lexington, Va., a front line in the culture wars. Washington and Lee and VMI are laboratories in the search to translate and adapt programs that have worked successfully in one era into a different era. Are their core values timeless or relics of the past? The Spanish philosopher George Santayana said that ‘those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.’ But what about those who can’t let go of the past and those who want to erase the past?” This is a bit of nonsense in that no one is trying to erase the past. Changing who you choose to honor is not erasing the past.


Willie Hudspeth in the spot where the monument once stood, with a picture from from one of his many protests.
Andy LaViolette for Insider

This article tells us, “The Historic Square in Denton, Texas, is a sprawling lawn dotted with old oak trees. On weekends, it’s a destination for families and students from Denton’s two major universities. The historic County Courthouse is in the center, surrounded by a commercial strip with a few hip coffee shops, a pizza joint where indie bands play late into the night, an old-fashioned ice cream shop, and a bookstore. For over a century – until last June 25 – there was also a Confederate monument: A 20-foot statue of a uniformed soldier over the words, ‘Our Confederate Soldiers.’ And for the last two decades, nearly every week on Sunday afternoon, from 4 to 7pm, a Black resident of Denton named Willie Hudspeth would set up a lawn chair, some signs, and sit in protest. The standoff finally came to an end one year ago, exactly one month after the killing of George Floyd, when under the cover of dark, county officials quietly dismantled the monument. Hudspeth – a retired middle school teacher, Vietnam veteran, and leader of the local NAACP – was already 54 years-old when he started his protests; by the time he watched it come down, he was 75 and bent with age. On the infamous night, Hudspeth was there, hauled out of bed at 4 in the morning by allies who heard the commotion. Cell phone video caught Hudspeth’s shocked reaction, as buzzsaws could be heard cutting through concrete. ‘Thank god it actually happened,’ he said in an interview the next day. But the secrecy around the removal was bittersweet. ‘For 21-years, I have been going down there, talking about removing the statue, and it’s just like these commissioners to do what they did.’ Today, there’s no trace of the monument on the Square.”


This June 30, 2020, file photo shows the Civil War statue at Veterans Garden of Honor in Allendale Township, Mich. A citizens committee in western Michigan has proposed removing a park statue of a Union soldier and Confederate soldier standing back to back as a slave child kneels between them. The Garden of Honor Memorial Committee presented its suggestion Monday, May 24, 2021, to the Allendale Township board which could vote June 14 on the statue’s future. (Cory Morse/The Grand Rapids Press via AP, File)

This article out of Allendale, Michigan, tells us, “Leaders in a western Michigan community have voted to keep a statue of Confederate and Union Civil War soldiers with a Black child kneeling between them.The Allendale Township board voted 5-2 Monday, despite a recommendation from a group that the statue be replaced by one with Union soldiers who are Black, Native American and white. ‘It’s been made very clear to me that the majority of our residents wish for the Civil War statue to remain in the garden of honor,’ said Jody Hansen, township clerk and board member. Dozens of people attended the meeting, which was held outdoors at a park bandshell, 15 miles (24 kilometers) west of Grand Rapids. ‘What better lesson can we teach our children than by being able to say, ‘We had this thing. We thought it was OK. We have since learned that we were wrong,” said area resident Cathy Seaver, who wants the statue removed. Trustee Barb VanderVeen, who opposed keeping the statue, asked if the child, which represents a slave, could at least be removed. Trustee Candy Kraker said the artist indicated that removing it would damage the structural integrity.”

We go back to the Old Dominion for this article, which says, “The original opponent of the Robert E. Lee statue issued a stern prophesy after the monument was erected in 1890. John Mitchell Jr. — newspaper editor, politician, banker and civil rights activist — predicted that the monument ‘will ultimately result in handing down to generations unborn a legacy of treason and blood.’ Mitchell, editor of the Richmond Planet, wasn’t done. He wrote of the black man: ‘He put up the Lee Monument, and should the time come, he’ll be there to take it down.’ The time has come. Gov. Ralph Northam is removing Lee from his pedestal as soon as possible. Richmond Mayor Levar Stoney will attempt to follow suit with Monument Avenue’s other Confederate statues in tandem with City Councilman Mike Jones. John Mitchell, the great-great-nephew of John Mitchell Jr., could not be happier. ‘Beautiful,’ he said Wednesday. ‘It has to be done.’ And Mitchell, a Richmond-based web designer and musician, says that when that pedestal becomes vacant, ‘Of course, I would like to see my great-great-uncle up there.’ The possibilities are endless, but I can’t think of a better choice than Mitchell, a fearless anti-lynching crusader who organized a successful streetcar boycott in Richmond — a half-century before the Martin Luther King Jr.-led Montgomery bus boycott — and ran for governor of Virginia on a ‘lily black ticket’ that included Maggie Lena Walker. That we are at a moment no one saw coming is due to the Black Lives Matter protesters who cast an unflinching light on the ugly symbolism behind these monuments. Few images are as powerful as the light projection of George Floyd’s face onto the graffiti-marked Lee monument, as was done Wednesday night.”

The article continues, ” ‘It is young people, a new generation, that are leading us,’ said Robert Johns, a relative of Barbara Johns, who as a 16-year-old schoolgirl in Prince Edward County became a heroine of the civil rights movement in Virginia. Richmond’s monuments survived the martyrdom, at the hand of white supremacists, of nine black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., and Heather Heyer in Charlottesville. But the national revulsion and furor unleashed by the torture of Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police officers landed at the doorstep of Monument Avenue. The graffiti handiwork of the protesters, in its rawness, connected the dots of modern-day policing to its slave patrol roots. But what those monuments represent is far more vulgar than the graffiti. They send a clear message that black lives don’t matter at all. The legacy of enslavement and treason has bled into our present. ‘Richmond is no longer the capital of the Confederacy,’ Mayor Levar Stoney said Thursday. As if to remove all doubt, that message was repeated by a descendant of the man on the monument. ‘The Lost Cause is dead,’ said the Rev. Robert W. Lee IV. ‘A new cause is upon us, one of equality and justice and peace and concord.’ Stoney summoned the words of the always-eloquent James Baldwin: ‘History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history.’ Richmond has become so fixated at carrying the weight of history that it failed to realize what a burden it was, until the demonstrators made it impossible to ignore. Northam spoke of how a little girl might feel upon standing in the 100-foot Lee circle and gazing up at a 12-ton monument, six stories high. ‘When it’s the biggest thing around, it sends a clear message: This is what we value the most.’ The monument, by its sheer scale, was designed to evoke shock and awe. It gave white supremacy a symbolic imperviousness — and worse, a veneer of virtue. ‘In 2020, we can no longer honor a system that was based on the buying and selling of enslaved people,’ the governor said. The oppression of black folks will not end with the removal of these monuments. As Northam noted, racism is a system that touches every person and every aspect of our lives. But it’s a start.”


Men with Dallas-based Unified Fine Arts dismantle the more than 100-year-old Confederate monument at Leonard Park, 1000 W. California St. in Gainesville on Wednesday afternoon, June 16. The statue was erected Feb. 15, 1908, by the Gainesville-based Lou Dougherty Chapter No. 366 Daughters of the Confederacy. Tanner Spearman/Gainesville Daily Register

This article out of Gainesville, Texas, tells us, “During a special meeting on July 14, 2020, the Gainesville City Council unanimously agreed to remove the Confederate monument. At that meeting, former Mayor Jim Goldsworthy said the decision wasn’t political. He said he’d been discussing the Confederate monuments in town since the George Floyd prayer vigil at the Gainesville Farmers Market in early June 2020. … The statue removal happened just a few days before Juneteenth, a holiday that marks the end of slavery in the U.S. However, it happened to just be coincidental, Mayor Tommy Moore told the Register Wednesday evening. … On Aug. 27, 2020, the city entered an agreement with the United Daughters of the Confederacy to remove the Confederate monument from the park and take it ‘within reasonable distance’ to a location selected by the UDC, according to a previous Register report. The agreement states the UDC must provide the Morton Museum of Cooke County in downtown Gainesville the first right of refusal. Sullivan has said there is no record in meeting minutes from the early 1900s that indicates the city owns the statue. According to an archived report, Sullivan budgeted $30,000 from the city’s Hotel Occupancy Tax fund for the monument removal project should the Morton Museum accept the statue. He said Wednesday evening that the remaining monies will be used to remove base. The move to Morton Museum will be after the end of the fiscal year, he said. The city’s fiscal year begins Oct. 1. Cooke County Heritage Society President Elaine McHorse previously said the museum will accept the statue if the city and UDC give it to them. … McHorse said she wasn’t aware the statue was being removed on Wednesday and could not say when the statue would be taken to the museum because none of her board members have talked with city officials about it to her knowledge.”

With this article we learn, “Growing up, CJ Hunt often looked askance at the monuments to the short-lived Confederate States of America that pepper the landscape of the United States. ‘Black people have always found these monuments weird,’ the Afro-Asian comedian and Daily Show field producer tells Yahoo Entertainment. ‘In the early 1870s, [abolitionist] Frederick Douglass saw fundraising happening for the first Robert E. Lee memorial, and was like, ‘What the f*** is happening?’’ Hunt was front and center when the contemporary debate over Civil War monuments ignited in 2015 after New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu proposed removing the city’s various Confederate memorials, including the Lee statue that Douglass objected to over a century earlier. Observing the heated city council debates that followed, he was struck by the entrenched attitudes of the mostly white voices arguing that the monuments to slaveowners like Lee should continue to stand. That, in turn, spurred him to ponder how these slabs of stone exist for storytelling rather than historical purposes. ‘It’s a thing that we think almost nothing about, but it’s also the most permanent type of text that exists. You can write a story into stone and put it in the middle of New York City or the middle of a park in Virginia, and it will just stay there for a century, and people will believe it’s part of the landscape.’ And so Hunt decided to go out and meet those believers where they live. The result is The Neutral Ground, his six-years-in-the-making debut documentary feature that’s having its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on Juneteenth, recently designated as a federal holiday by Congress and President Joe Biden. (The film will play on PBS on July 5 as the kick-off for the 34th season of POV.)

We learn, “The documentary follows Hunt as he makes extensive visits to the South, where the legacy of the Civil War is still very much present a century-and-a-half removed from the Confederacy’s defeat. In his conversations with the neo-Confederates who continue to literally re-enact their long-dead ancestors’ old battles, he saw firsthand the success of what he calls, ‘the most successful PR campaign that ever happened in America.’ ‘When PR campaigns stick, they stick, and that’s the case with the Lost Cause,’ Hunt says, referring to the alternative Civil War narrative that has long sought to recast the Confederacy in a more heroic light by backgrounding discussions of slavery and secession in favor of the idea that Southern soldiers were nobly fighting to uphold states’ rights. And as The Neutral Ground illustrates, enshrining the Lost Cause in stone was a long-term project undertaken by private groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy, which had a vested interest in changing the narrative. ‘After the war, the UDC and other places were like, ‘Let’s not talk about the generals, let’s not talk about the vice president [Alexander Hamilton Stephens] who clearly said that slavery was the cornerstone of the Confederacy.’ They were so embarrassed by all that, the only thing they could talk about was, ‘Let’s just focus on the individuals. What was in the hearts of those men?’ Find me another war where we define the case by the individual motivations of the soldiers,’ Hunt continues. ‘We don’t do that with other eras, but the PR campaign of the Lost Cause was ‘focus on what we imagine within the hearts of individuals.’ That is how many people still talk about the Confederacy, and that extends to the monuments: they aren’t a story about a government that fought like hell to keep slavery. It’s ‘Look at these common soldiers — good people on both sides who just got caught up in the mix.’’ “


Right wing extremists gather to protest the removal of the Robert E. Lee monument in Louisiana (Photo: Paavo Hanninen)

The article continues, “There are examples of more recently built monuments that try to push back against that narrative. In the film, Hunt visits the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, an 18th century plantation that exists today as a museum dedicated to depicting the harsh realities of slavery in the Deep South. The grounds include a striking monument marking the 1811 German Coast uprising — the largest slave revolt in the South. The organizers of the revolt were later executed, and their heads displayed on poles — a disturbing sight that has been recreated for the Whitney’s instillation. ‘That monument is controversial, and I understand why,’ says Hunt, who is alternately shocked and enraptured by it in the film. ‘It’s like, ‘Please, why are you showing me yet another piece of trauma done to Black bodies?’ This didn’t make it into the film, but I was talking to other Black tourists who were there, and I asked one woman, ‘Do you think this is too much?’ And her response was, “No, this is what’s happening now.’’ Even as institutions like the Whitney try to challenge the Lost Cause narrative, Hunt sees its impact extending beyond monuments. In recent weeks, actress Ellie Kemper was at the center of a social media firestorm when resurfaced pictures showed her being crowned the Queen of Love and Beauty at the 1999 Veiled Prophet Ball, an event affiliated with a St. Louis organization that was co-founded by a Confederate veteran. (Kemper later apologized on Instagram, writing: ‘The century-old organization that hosted the debutante ball had an unquestionably racist, sexist and elitist past. I was not aware of this history at that time, but ignorance is no excuse.’) And in the wake of the George Floyd protests last summer, Amazon reportedly weighed evicting The Dukes of Hazzard from its streaming lineup over the show’s most famous ‘character,’ the General Lee — an orange 1969 Dodge Charger emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag. (The CBS series is still available to rent or purchase on Amazon, but is no longer streaming for free.)”

We also learn, “Much like New Orleans’s Lee statue, the racist origins of both the Veiled Prophet Ball and the battle flag seen in The Dukes of Hazzard were obscured by the fact that they’ve endured long enough to become part of the cultural landscape. And that, in turn, allows defenders to think of them in highly personal terms. ‘Propaganda is always most effective when it’s able to attach itself to nostalgia,’ Hunt says. ‘So many of the people we met in the film weren’t actually trying to protect Robert E. Lee, the man — they were trying to protect the fact that they have memories of catching beads during Mardi Gras at Lee Circle. And The Dukes of Hazzard isn’t even really about the Confederacy, but people still remember the General Lee and the Duke boys. So when you say, ‘Hey we want to question what this thing is doing in society,’ people are like, “Why are you trying to take something from me?’ The idea that you have can have a pageant for the ‘veiled prophet’ is absolutely born out of KKK and white supremacist traditions,’ he continues. ‘I hope that this film makes it impossible for folks not to be having the difficult conversations about what that actually means. Once you start seeing how central white supremacy was — not only to the Confederacy, but to the nation — then you just see all the echoes of it. You’re scrolling your Twitter feed and see that Trump is doubling down on defending the Charlottesville [rioters] at the same time that we’re also talking about Ellie Kemper and critical race theory in schools. I hope that the film is like a black light where take it into a hotel room and go, ‘Oh my god.’’ Hunt has firsthand experience with what happened on the streets of Charlottesville in 2017. Two years into making The Neutral Ground, he traveled to Virginia to observe the Unite the Right rally and his camera was rolling as the event descended into chaos and violence. That harrowing footage — including a moment where Hunt is pepper-sprayed while filming the melee — is shown towards the end of the documentary. ‘I didn’t look at that footage for a couple of years,’ Hunt says now. ‘I just delivered it to my editor and said, ‘I’ll be using this.’ It was part of a coping mechanism of getting some distance from it.’ Within the film, Charlottesville functions as a case study in where white supremacy can lead if allowed to fester unchecked. While the neo-Confederates that Hunt interviews earlier on come across as silly and even avuncular — the director says that early versions of the documentary played almost like a Daily Show sketch — that’s the moment where any sense of humor vanishes.”


In this Aug. 14, 2017, file photo, Tennessee State Troopers stand near a bust of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest after protesters covered it and placed signs in front in Nashville, Tenn. Activists and Democratic lawmakers have called for the removal of a bust of Forrest from the state Capitol. (AP Photo/Mark Humphrey, File)

This article out of Memphis, Tennessee, tells us, “Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest’s polarizing presence has hung over Memphis since he moved here in 1852 — his legacy cemented by a giant statue that loomed over all who passed his gravesite in a popular park. Defenders considered him a hero for his Civil War exploits. Detractors called him a violent racist and noted his early leadership role in the Ku Klux Klan. Now the former slave trader’s remains are set to be moved to a new Confederate museum in Columbia, Tennessee — another milestone in the effort to remove statues, monuments, and now the remains, of Confederate leaders from public spaces. As workers prepared to dig up his grave earlier this month, a white man waved a rebel flag, sang ‘Dixie’ and launched an expletive-laced tirade at Shelby County Commissioner Tami Sawyer. Sawyer, who is Black, plucked Confederate flags off a chain-link fence surrounding the site as George Johnson paced behind her on a concrete platform. When he cursed at her again, Sawyer replied: ‘It’s not your property,’ and turned toward reporters gathered for the June 1 news conference. Health Sciences Park, where Forrest and his wife had been buried for more than a century, was called Forrest Park until 2013, when the name was changed. The statue of the general on horseback was removed in 2017, after a campaign Sawyer helped lead. … Gradually, Forrest’s legacy has been dismantled in Memphis. Forrest traded slaves near the area where people of many races now come to eat, drink and watch ball games downtown. A short drive away is the old Lorraine Motel, where civil rights leader Martin Luther King. Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968. Many in majority-Black Memphis are eager to see Forrest gone. The park where his grave was located has been the site of protests related to the Black Lives Matter movement. A music festival for Juneteenth, which marks the end of American slavery, is scheduled there this weekend.”

According to this article, “Three Potomac Streets Named After Confederate Officers to be renamed. Earlier today Councilmember Andrew Friedson announced that the Montgomery County Planning Department will rename three Potomac streets named for Confederate Officers. Per Montgomery Planning: ‘The Montgomery County Planning Department, part of The Maryland-National Capital Park and Planning Commission (M-NCPPC), has announced it will rename three streets identified as having full name matches with Confederate soldiers with those that honor local African American historical figures Geneva Mason and William Dove. The streets currently known as J.E.B. Stuart Road and J.E.B. Stuart Court will be renamed Geneva Mason Road and Geneva Mason Court, respectively. The street currently known as Jubal Early Court will be renamed William Dove Court.’ These three streets are the first to be renamed as a result of the M-NCPPC’s Street and Parks Facilities Renaming Review project, a joint effort of the Montgomery County Planning Department and Montgomery County Parks Department, both part of M-NCPPC. The project began in June 2020 after the Montgomery County Council sent a letter to the Planning Board and the County Executive requesting ‘a comprehensive review of all County owned and maintained street names and public facilities to determine all those named for Confederate soldiers or those who otherwise do not reflect Montgomery County values.’ After the Montgomery County Planning Board unanimously approved a resolution to begin the renaming process in January 2021, Montgomery Planning worked with the community to garner ideas and feedback on new street names. Out of all the individual names proposed for the new street names, Geneva Mason’s name received overwhelming support from the community.”

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