A small group of black students at Washington and Lee University took school administrators by surprise with a list of demands that included renouncing Robert E. Lee for his racism. The students, who do not represent all African American students at Washington and Lee, call themselves The Committee. The Committee has threated civil disobedience if W & L officials administrators do not meet their demands.
A group of black law students at Washington and Lee University is urging administrators to atone for its Confederate heritage and what they call the “dishonorable conduct” of namesake Robert E. Lee. The movement has struck a racial divide on the bucolic campus in Lexington, Va., where black students make up about 3.5 percent of the total student population. Third-year law student Dominik Taylor, a descendent of slaves on his father’s side, said he felt betrayed by admissions representatives who touted the school’s diversity. “They assured me it was a welcoming environment where everyone sticks together as a community,” Taylor said. “Then I came here and felt ostracized and alienated.” Taylor is among a group of students who have urged the board of trustees to make the university more welcoming for minority students. Known collectively as the Committee, the students wrote a letter to the trustees with a list of “demands,” promising acts of civil disobedience if they see no action before Sept. 1. The students want Confederate flags removed from the chapel. They also want administrators to ban Confederate reenactors and sympathizers from campus on the Lee-Jackson holiday in Virginia, and they ask that the university’s undergraduate school cancel classes on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. The Washington and Lee law school began observing the holiday in 2013, but the undergraduate students still attend classes. Although Lee-Jackson Day, the Friday before the King holiday, is not a formal holiday on campus, the school does honor Lee annually around his birthday on Founder’s Day. The Committee also wants the administrators to issue an apology for the university’s connection to slavery and the “racist and dishonorable conduct of Robert E. Lee,” the general who led Confederate forces during the Civil War.
Hold on a second. Did members of The Committee not do their basic research? Who on earth do they think this school was named for? This situation is ridiculous. It makes about as much sense hating polygamists and Mormons, and liking to drink booze, coffee, coke and having a carton a week cigarette habit and going to Brigham Young University. Brigham Young was a polygamist in his day and most people attending that school are Mormons. They do not permit smoking and drinking on campus. I am unsure about coffee and cokes but I know you can’t have booze or cigarettes. I have seen the signs. So why would you chose to go there if all that offends you? You wouldn’t.
The Committee members should not be going to Washington & Lee. It is a private school. It honors George Washington and Robert E. Lee, for whom the school is named. Lee is buried on the campus. He was who he was. If these facts offend one’s sensibilities, then don’t go to a school that obviously honors the man who was president of this university. As for the decorated chapel that is dedicated to Lee, why would anyone expect it to display a theme that was not part of the Confederacy? The chapel is named Lee Chapel and his tomb is inside the chapel.
The Committee members need to get real. I am not saying their feelings aren’t valid. Their demands are what are ludicrous. They should go to a school that is far more in keeping with their own sensibilities. I hope the school administration tells them to take a hike and refuses to cave in to their demands.
Don’t go to a school that is named for controversial historical figures and then expect the school to disavow said figures. I find the Committee offensive, and frankly, dangerous to our sense of history. All such schools should be up in arms. When is the University of Virginia going to be asked to disavow its founder, Thomas Jefferson, because his past is repugnant to some?
Some of our history isn’t very pretty–in fact a whole lot of it isn’t. Do we eradicate our history, like Soviet Russia, to make it more acceptable, or do we take the good and the bad and learn from each?
I agree with you. Sounds like a handful of kids trying to make a name for themselves. Someone else could go to a historically black college and pull the same stunt …
The idea of students sending “demands” to their school is inherently ridiculous.
Abso-frickin’-lutely!
Of all the colleges in the world where this might not be a good idea . . . .
The place of honour that General Lee holds in the chapel at W&L is because of the dedication and sacrifice he brought to educating Southern men in the bleak aftermath of the War. His focus was intense and unbending. He became an educator and and effective one to boot. It is a shame he lived such a short time after the war, but the progress of Washington College in the short time he was President was enormous. As you say, anyone attending that school has to know that history. Even the General had to know that he carried with him what had become historical baggage post-Appomattox. He was intent on adding another chapter that provided balance to that story. He succeeded admirably.
By the way, the recumbent statue of Lee (shown in the image in the post) in the Chapel is an extraordinary sculpture. It alone is worth a trip to Lexington (although there are many other reasons to spend time there – I’d go just to visit Traveller’s grave).
I think I am going to plan a trip there. What a great idea, Scout. Thanks for filling in the history lesson so eloquently.
In 1975, Lee’s full rights of citizenship were posthumously restored by a joint congressional resolution effective June 13, 1865.
I find this phrase so appropriate for moments such as this-it’s another Forrest Gump moment: Stupid is as stupid does. The students are rabble rousers who have no business at W&L. I hope the president refuses their demands. But to have someone go to a HBCU and do the same thing would be to lower that “someone” to the level of these students thus creating another Forrest Gump moment.
Have never been to W&L but now hope to go. I have a great deal of respect for General Lee who, I believe, was not a radical racist but did own a few slaves. He believed, as most Southerners of his time, that slavery was ordained by the Creator. Interestingly, the slaves he and his wife inherited were all emancipated by 1862. IMHO, Lee did not fully believe in the Confederate cause but his roots were deep in Virginia and although he was offered command of the Union Army, he chose to resign and take up the Confederate battle. Ironically, I suspect the war would have ended much sooner had he commanded the Union forces
He felt like most people of his time, at least in Virginia, that he was first a Virginian. He felt he could never go to war against his own people.
I have a picture of him discretely displayed in my living room. Joan of Arc is also there. (Pictures people have given me.)
A trip to Stratford Hall is another good field trip.
Lee in correspondence expressed his abhorrence of slavery and his view that secession was a profound mistake. Nonetheless, to be accurate about this, he was deeply part of a culture that had nurtured slavery for generations. His father, through bad habits and bad judgements, lost his estate and the slaves that went with it. Lee, as a boy, grew up as a townie in Alexandria. His mother was a Carter, so she may have retained some slave property, but her circumstances were much reduced by her much older husband’s profligacy. The Carter cousins all lived on large estates like Shirley where slaves were held in large number. Lee would have been very familiar with the whole plantation, slave-based economy. After Lee married into the Custis family, he, in middle age, found himself the Executor of a poorly drafted and constructed estate plan of his father-in-law. The will required him to manumit Mr. Custis’s slave holdings while at the same time trying to bring Arlington plantation back to profitability. Accounts of the time indicate that Lee was not particularly enlightened or advanced in his thinking about or treatment of the Arlington servants. He clearly held the view that the servants were not ready to survive in the outer world as free citizens and that it would be a moral wrong simply to turn them out en masse. Some of the servants (and later writers) felt he slow-walked the manumission elements of the will in order to keep the estate afloat, the latter duty being as much a part of his Executor’s responsibilities as were the emancipation provisions.
Having said all this, without Lee there would be no W&L. He is central to what that university is. It would not have survived post-War without his dedicated, singular leadership. He could have done other things that would have been more remunerative for him and his family. He was very much a product of his time and place, but for that institution, his place of honor is well-deserved and should endure. If students are uncomfortable with that reality, they should leave, and I can’t imagine why they considered going there in the first place.
I’m not in the Robert E. Lee fan club. He was fighting for an evil cause.
Just what was his cause? I would read up on REL before responding?
While I would defend REL in another post, I am not defending him per se in this one. I am defending the rights of a private college to honor whoever they want to honor, especially a past president.
I would take the identical point of view about Brigham Young University. If you don’t care for the honoree or their rules, go elsewhere.
Always got a kick out of the fact that the statue was made with Vermont marble.
Always got a kick out of the fact that the statue was made with Vermont marble.
The country was healing? Just guessing.
Best marble.