Milley told a House committee in June 2020 the Confederacy doesn't deserve to be commemorated in this way. He said those names can be reminders to Black soldiers that the rebel officers fought for an institution that may have enslaved their ancestors. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has spoken forcefully about a legacy of Black pain reflected in Confederate names at Army bases where today at least 20% of soldiers are Black. Reflecting a shift in the military's thinking, Army Gen. For years, the military defended the naming of bases after Confederate officers as recently as 2015 the Army argued that the names did not honor the rebel cause but were a gesture of reconciliation with the South.Ĭongress easily agreed last year to compel the name changes to remove what are seen by many as emblems of human bondage and Black oppression. The push to rename Fort Pickett and other bases is part of a national reckoning with centuries of racial injustice, triggered most recently by the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Army officer commission shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861.
He was a Virginia native and a West Point graduate who resigned his U.S.
Pickett, best remembered for a failed Confederate assault at Gettysburg that became known as Pickett’s Charge. “It should have happened a long time ago," he says, because the names are a reminder of slavery and a period in American history when Black people had no voice.įort Pickett’s namesake is Maj. “Change them!” says Nathaniel Miller, a Black member of the town council who was stationed at Pickett after he returned from Vietnam in 1973. Others here say it's high time to drop the names. In all, the names of at least nine Army bases in six states will be changed. Some are troubled by Congress requiring the Pickett name be dropped as part of a wider scrubbing of military base names that commemorate the Confederacy or honor officers who fought for it. In and around Blackstone, about 50 miles (80 kilometers) southwest of Richmond, that shadow can stir passions when talk turns to nearby Fort Pickett. (AP) - Civil War history casts a long shadow in Virginia, the birthplace of Confederate generals, scene of their surrender and now a crossroad of controversy over renaming military bases that honor rebel leaders.
(AP Photo/Robert Burns) (Robert Burns) Octoat 5:19 am EDT By ROBERT BURNSīLACKSTONE, Va. Voters will cast ballots in a November referendum on whether to relocate this monument to Confederate soldiers that has stood in front of the county courthouse since 1893. 19, 2021, photo shows a Confederate monument in front a county courthouse in Nottoway County, Va.
0 kommentar(er)
