A Texas high school won’t get rid of its Robert E. Lee namesake

A school board in Texas decided it wouldn’t even entertain a vote on changing the name of Robert E. Lee High School on Monday evening — a decision that came despite nearly an hour of passionate speeches against the commander of the Confederate army.

The motion to rename Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler Independent School District was formally introduced into the meeting on Monday, but no board member seconded the motion and the proposal failed.

According to CBS affiliate Tyler TV station KYTX, several of the impassioned board members wanted to rename the school, but didn’t think the timing was right.

“Why should we give present-day powers to [Robert E. Lee’s] actions by continuing to place a negative stereotype on a school building named after him,” board member Jean Washington said. “To those that say that keeping the name is a legacy of hate, leave it to be remembered that hate is a learned behavior,” she said. “A name on a building should not foster that. If anything, it should teach the students how far we as a nation have come.”

Rev. Orenthia Mason gave one of the longest speeches, according to the CBS affiliate, who criticized both sides of the argument and said there wouldn’t be any “real winners.”

“I’ve been in situations in public where attacks were made on Mrs. Washington and upon me, and said it clear in the newspaper, that the black community is divided. And once we continue to attack each other, then the other citizens in the community will come to the conclusion that we don’t know how to work together,” Ms. Mason said.

The high school has been plagued by racist undertones, many unrelated to its name. The school first opened in the 1950s as an all-white school, according to a local ABC affiliate, and didn’t enroll any black students until the 1970s. Since then, there have been numerous, unsuccessful pushes by the community to remove Lee’s name from the school.

The board’s decision to not even consider a new name for the school comes at a time when schools across the nation are choosing to drop confederate soldiers’ names from their helm. Schools in Tulsa, Oklahoma decided to change their names from slave owner Chouteau Elementary to Wayman Tisdale Fine Arts Academy and Columbus Elementary to Dolores Huerta Elementary School, and Lee High School in San Antonio was renamed the Legacy of Educational Excellence High School.

The movement of removing Confederate symbols has jumped further than renaming schools and started moving quicker since the violent white supremacist rally last August in Charlottesville, Virginia. At least 110 public Confederate symbols have been removed, although 1,728 still stand, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Cover image: RICHMOND, VA - SEPTEMBER 15: A statue of Confederate general Robert E. Lee towers over Monument Avenue on September 15, 2017 in Richmond, Virginia. Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images.