After being blocked by Donald Trump and his white nationalist sedition-supporting advisers (who would go on to mount an attempted coup), moves to end the practice of naming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals are finally making progress. A federal commission has now released its recommendations for renaming nine U.S. Army bases named after Confederate traitors, replacing them with names of American heroes who didn’t support a horrifically bloody rebellion against the United States so that Southern elites could continue to own slaves.
The Washington Post brings us the new proposed names. Texas’ Fort Hood would be renamed Fort Cavazos, honoring the first Hispanic brigadier general. Fort Benning would become Fort Moore. Fort Bragg would become Fort Liberty. Fort Hill becomes Fort Walker, honoring Civil War surgeon Mary Edwards Walker.
The commission has leaned into honoring women and non-white Army leaders, which will no doubt enrage Trump-supporting seditionists already reeling from the thought that murderous traitors of a past age—and losers, no less!—will be losing their current publicity. But all nine Army facilities, notes the Post, were constructed and named in the Jim Crow era, a period when Southern segregationists were putting up monuments to near-forgotten Confederate leaders and demanding the nation honor those murderers as supposed American forefathers.
These bases were from the beginning named as a thumb in the eye to Black Americans. The names have lasted this long solely because racist conservative leaders of each later decade demanded it be so.
If the commission’s recommendations hold, no longer will new Army recruits have to show up to installations named after the nation’s most famous traitors. It’s about time. But the pushback is going to be intense, and it’s going to come nearly exclusively from modern-day seditionists who still look to those old traitors for moral support. Place your bets now on which Republican hacks will feign the most outrage over the Army’s plan to stop honoring those who staged a rebellion against the United States.
