NY Times: “As recently as a decade ago, U.S. military officials stood by the anemic fiction that Confederate base names had nothing to do with race hatred. But that position rang hollow each time Confederate ideology figured in episodes of racist violence. The connection was crystal clear in 2015, when a gunman sought to instigate a race war by killing nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C.
Congress finally parted company with the myth of the noble Confederate in 2021. It overrode a presidential veto to order the Defense Department to rid its assets of “names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia” that commemorate the Confederate States of America. The legislation established a commission that brought forward new names for nine Army installations in the South.
The main event of the renaming project unfolds on Thursday in Virginia, when Fort Lee is rechristened Fort Gregg-Adams. This change derives its emotional power from the fact that the saint of the lavishly racist Lost Cause is being replaced by two African Americans who served in the Army during the Jim Crow era.”