Veterans have identified a number of heroes far more deserving of veneration than these Confederate icons. As both a soldier and an airman, I spent much of my time in the military at the “rebel forts” — the 10 U.S. Army posts that were named after Confederate generals.
As a young recruit from Texas in the late ’90s, I attended infantry school at Fort Benning, Georgia. It is named after Confederate Gen. Henry Benning, who commanded the 17th Georgia Infantry under Robert E. Lee. I later deployed to the Army’s Joint Readiness Training Center (JRTC) at Fort Polk, Louisiana, which honors Gen. Leonidas Polk, a reverend-turned-soldier who enjoyed little success on the battlefield due to his inexperience and was killed in action during the Atlanta Campaign.
I was once tasked with a special duty assignment that involved acting as chauffeur to my squad leader who had been ordered to remove a racist tattoo from his arm. Ironically, the removal took place at Fort Gordon in Georgia, named after John Brown Gordon, who joined the Confederate Army as a captain in the 6th Alabama Infantry Regiment despite having no military experience.
In fact, during my decade on active duty, I visited all 10 Army posts named after Confederate generals. But at the time, I never once considered the origin of their names.
The debate about what to do with Confederate monuments and symbols has simmered for decades. With the recent killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, as well as repeated instances of abusive policing caught on camera, the pot has now boiled over.
At least 110 Confederate monuments and symbols have been removed by states, counties, and municipalities nationwide in the last five years. However, according to a study by the Southern Poverty Law Center, 1,728 symbols remain standing, including the 10 U.S. Army posts that are named after Confederate icons. In all, Virginia hosts three of those posts. Louisiana and Georgia have two apiece. Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas each have one.
All 10 of the “rebel forts” were established between World Wars I and II, a period in which the U.S. Army attempted to recruit as many men as possible. (Despite this tactic, the Army still had to resort to drafting soldiers in both wars.) The Army thought that naming a large military post after Confederate generals might appeal to large swathes of young, able-bodied fighters, in particular young white men from the South.
The federal government also required huge chunks of land for their military reservations. The government named these plots of land after Confederate generals in order to get buy-in from southern politicians and policymakers by appealing to their “Lost Cause” ideology, an interpretation of the Civil War that romanticized the “Old Antebellum South” and the Confederate efforts.
The Lost Cause ideology allowed millions of Southerners to feel better about losing the war while simultaneously empowering the North to be magnanimous in victory. While the ideology has lost much of its academic support, its ethos still echoes today in Confederate monuments, symbols, and pop culture. In response to a TIME magazine article critical of the 10 rebel forts, the Army Times in 2015 responded that they named the bases “in the spirit of reconciliation, not division.”
As we’re seeing today, racial equality was sacrificed upon the altar of reunification. Millions of Black and Brown Americans would go on to suffer institutionalized racism long after the Civil War ended, thanks in large part to the cultural and historical minimization of slavery’s impacts.
A statue is not how we record history in our culture; a statue is erected for veneration.
Still, efforts are currently underway to course-correct the Confederate symbolism. In the wake of nationwide protests, the Senate Armed Services Committee approved an amendment to the 2021 Defense Authorization Bill, authored by Sen. Elizabeth Warren, which gives the Defense Department three years to implement new names for installations bearing the names of Confederate soldiers. In response, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy said they “are open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic.”
The United States Marine Corps has already banned images of the Confederate flag from its installations, an action that was quickly followed by the Navy. The military, long a leader in racial progress and desegregation, has recognized that a symbol that serves as oppressive to a large segment of both the military and the American public might not be the best symbol for good order and discipline.
Defending his decision to ban the Confederate flag, Marine commandant Gen. David Berger said, “I cannot have that division inside our Corps.” He added, “The symbols that Marines should focus on are ones that unite them — the Corps’ eagle, globe, and anchor; the American flag and the Marines’ exclusive MarPat camouflage uniforms.”
The Army, for its part, has a regulation in place that sets the criteria for memorializing soldiers: “Memorializations will honor deceased heroes and other deceased distinguished individuals of all races in our society, and will present them as inspirations to their fellow Soldiers, employees, and other citizens.”
Based on the Army’s own definition, the rebel forts should be renamed.