In May, I wrote about the school district of Shenandoah County, Virginia that month becoming the first school district in America to reinstate school names associated with the Confederate States of America (CSA) that had been dropped as part of a trend across the country. The reinstated school names reference CSA military leaders Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Turner Ashby.
Here is an update. The political correctness enforcers are seeking to crush this decision of a local school board to reinstate the school names dropped around four years earlier. On Tuesday, the Virginia National Association for the Advancement of Colored People filed suit in the United States District Court for the District of Western Virginia seeking a court order to require the school board, among other things, “to remove the Confederate names and mascots, and to prevent any future naming involving Confederate leaders or references to the Confederacy.”
Consider this quote, included in a Tuesday WHSV-TV report, from a lawyer who spoke at a press conference promoting the lawsuit:
‘The school board is compelling these students to express a view to which they disagree,’ Ashley Joyner Chavous with Covington & Burling LLP said.
The same argument would work as well for schools named after many other people. Presidents are common people to name schools after. There may not be a single public high school in America named after any president and having more than a couple dozen students where there is not a student who disagrees with something the school’s namesake said, thought, or did. Of course, many students, though, think little or even not at all about the people after which their schools are named.
Ashley Joyner Chavous is one of seven Covington & Burling lawyers listed at the end of the complaint that has started off the lawsuit. In case you are wondering about this Covington & Burling law firm, it is not a local law firm with a shingle hanging out in front of its Main Street office. It is a thousand-plus attorneys international “white shoe” law firm headquartered in Washington, DC that even has its own “partners” page on the website of the World Economic Forum. Take that, school board.
This lawsuit is about nipping in the bud school districts asserting independence from the new party line. It is about making it clear to any other school district out there that a legal tidal wave will hit it if it dares step out of line.