Washington: In 2023, amid a national reckoning on issues of race in America, seven Army bases’ names were changed because they honoured Confederate leaders.
Now, those same bases are reverting back to their original names, this time with different namesakes who share Confederate surnames — the Army found other service members with the same last names to honour.
The move is stirring up conversation in and outside
military circles. Skeptics wonder if the true intention is to undermine efforts to move away from Confederate associations,
an issue that has long split people who favor preserving an aspect of southern heritage and those who want slavery-supporting revels stripped of valor.
Marc Morial, president and CEO of the National Urban League, a civil rights group, said the latest renaming is a “difference without a distinction.”
The wiping away of names that were given by the Biden administration, many of which honoured service members who were women or minorities, is the latest move by Defense Secretary
Pete Hegseth to align with Trump’s purging of all programs, policies, books and social media mentions of references to diversity, equity and inclusion.
Neither the Department of Defense nor the Department of the Army responded to emailed requests for comment.
Federal law now bars the military from returning to honoring Confederates, but the move restores names know by generations of soldiers.
Following the election of President Abraham Lincoln, who opposed the expansion of slavery, 11 southern states seceded from the United States to form the Confederacy, or the Confederate States of America, to preserve slavery an institution that enslaved millions of African Americans.
Their secession led to the Civil War, which the Confederates ultimately lost in 1865.
By restoring the old names with soldiers or figures who were not Confederates, “they are trying to be slick,” Morial said.