Ruling in a lawsuit brought by the NAACP, a federal judge on Friday ordered the Shenandoah County, Virginia School Board to reverse its 2024 reversal of the renaming of two formerly pro-Confederate schools, the AP reports. The board voted 5-1 to change Mountain View High School back to Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary back to Ashby-Lee Elementary, names that had been first changed in 2020 in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.
“The Confederate names were restored with complete awareness of their historic legacy and ongoing discriminatory impact. In the court’s view, the affirmative act of reinstating these vestiges of segregation is far more problematic than a passive failure to remove a long-standing name or symbol,” US District Judge Michael Urbanski wrote in his ruling that the board had violated Black students’ rights under the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. At the time, one of the pro-Confederate school board members had said that the 2020 change was “not an innocent mistake by some inexperienced school board. No, this was a carefully choreographed advance of a school board alluding to ignore the people they represented.”
The member, Gloria Carlineo, probably meant “colluded” instead of “alluded.”