...everytime his name gets mentioned?Did slave owners write this? https://t.co/z2rh8Au3j4
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 7, 2021
The high school I attended was named for Robert E. Lee. It's recently been renamed "Tyler Legacy,"* because it's located in Tyler, Texas. The town was named for President John Tyler, who was POTUS when Texas joined the Union (then left shortly thereafter, then that departure was voided as a matter of law; and war.) John Tyler was a notorious racist, history records. I suppose we should remove that name from the state maps, too? (Tyler has two high schools, one named "John Tyler." It, too, has been renamed, probably because Lee had to give up its name.). I'm not excessively proud of all this, although Lee is more associated with slavery in the popular mind than Tyler. Still; where's the beef here?
Maybe it's a regional thing, but while I'm quite willing to say statutes to Robert E. Lee (erected, as AP notes for this one, at least a generation after the war, when younger people forgot the reality of the "Lost Cause" and so grew nostalgic for it, eating sour grapes that set their children's children's children's teeth on edge) need to come down, I don't understand Rupar's objection. Lee was considered, even within my lifetime, to be a "Civil War hero," and statutes to him are now widely seen as symbols of racial injustice. That change, too, has happened within my lifetime. And that history explains why the statute was up in the first place, and why it's being removed now, which is what the AP story should be doing. So...
Where's the beef?
*yes, that's even worse, seeing as Texas broke from Mexico so Anglos could get in on that slave economy making the south rich, and President Tyler was all for that. And "Robert E. Lee" was named by the students of the then new school in the late '50's, just as Brown v. Board was being handed down and the civil rights movement was aborning. And the school went full bore with Civil War imagery, including a football field sized Confederate Battle Flag and a working cannon manned by students in grey civil war uniforms. Yeah, we weren't subtle. "Tyler Legacy" very intentionally captures all that. The more things change, and all.
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