It is the nation’s business, however, to record irrevocably that the Confederate army commander led a bloody fight that cost thousands upon thousands of lives, just to uphold a traitorous insurrection rooted in slavery.
What matters most to the board, so it seems, is Lee’s association with the history, values and traditions of the university. He went all out on behalf of the Lexington, Va., school, just as he was all in for the Union’s defeat.
As for people deprived of basic rights based on skin color, the army general and college president’s contribution to them was: Heap injustice upon injustice.
But, then again, what harm was that, where Washington and Lee is concerned. Whose ox was being gored?
The Washington and Lee board credited Lee with the creation of “an exceptional liberal arts and legal education and common experiences and values.” But the success of what was then the all-male, Whites-only Washington College meant little to my once-enslaved great-grandparents, uncles and aunts who, at the time of Lee’s college presidency, were eking out a post-Civil War living in Culpeper County, Va., about 100 miles northeast of Lexington.
But what did they matter?
The man that the Washington and Lee board deemed worthy of honor and respect wrote in an 1856 letter to his wife: “I think [slavery] however a greater evil to the white than to the black race, & while my feelings are strongly interested in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former. The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing” — read: slavery — “is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence.”
So happens that at the time, members of my family were undergoing “painful discipline” as “property” of the Colbert and Rixey families of Culpeper, according to Culpeper County courthouse records.
Even if my kinfolk had made it to the Washington College campus, I don’t think a fine old time would have been waiting.
The historian Elizabeth Brown Pryor’s portrait of Lee in “Reading the Man,” which examined his history and writings, notes that during his college presidency, students there formed their own chapter of the Ku Klux Klan, scaring Blacks and Whites alike with notices depicting skeletons, coffins and black crepe.
And, according to Pryor, students at Washington College were known by the local Freedmen’s Bureau to attempt to abduct and rape Black schoolgirls from nearby Black schools. The school may have provided exceptional arts and legal education, as the Washington and Lee board touts. As for teaching respect for Blacks? Probably not in the curriculum.
Another untaught lesson? With perhaps the exception of the Klan, there may have been no greater foe of Black enfranchisement than Washington College President Robert E. Lee.
He said as much in the “White Sulphur Manifesto,” which he, while college president, published on Aug. 26, 1868, along with several men of the old Confederacy in White Sulphur Springs, W.Va. The Reconstruction era had started and with it, federal support for racial equality.
Wrote Lee:
“The idea that the Southern people are hostile to the negroes, and would oppress them if it were in their power to do so, is entirely unfounded.”
“It is true that the people of the South, together with the people of the North and West, are, for obvious reasons, opposed to any system of laws which will place the political power of the country in the hands of the negro race. But this opposition springs from no feelings of enmity, but from a deep seated conviction that at present the negroes have neither the intelligence nor other qualifications which are necessary to make them safe depositories of political power.”
With deep reflection upon the Washington and Lee’s board decision, I better understand how advocates of Jim Crow and champions of segregation as the law of the land continue, to this day, to enjoy status of great respect and admiration. I also see how easily measures to restrict voting — which fall disproportionately on Black and brown voters — are making their way through state legislatures and being defended in Congress.
Because, when you get right down to it, whose ox is being gored?
That’s why Lee’s name stays up, while voting rights protections are going down, and the struggle never ends.
Read more:
"Opinion" - Google News
June 12, 2021 at 02:29AM
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What Washington and Lee has embraced - The Washington Post
"Opinion" - Google News
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