This past weekend, in Montgomery, AL I stood in the Legacy Museum and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice surrounded by the weight of history—our history. I saw the names, the chains, the terror written into law, the bodies strung from trees like strange fruit, the incarceration statistics. I felt the gravity of centuries of pain, and yet, what shook me just as deeply was not only what was behind us—but what is still wrapped tight around us.
Complicity – the quiet acceptance of injustice. Ignorance is not the act of not knowing, but the passive choice of ignoring. The refusal to confront truth. Consider the audacity of a system that still forces Black and Brown children to learn and thrive under the names of those who fought to keep their ancestors enslaved, and their descendants who don’t realize they lost (or did they?). I speak from a space of knowing, having once taught at Lee High School in Huntsville, Alabama. I walked those halls, labored in the classrooms, and looked into the eyes of those students—brilliant, gifted, filled with promise—and I asked myself the same question I ask today: How can they truly learn and be whole under the banner of their oppressor? Would the Jewish people require their children to attend a school named after Adolf Hitler? Would Germany even allow a school to be named after him? Would America ask Japanese American students to pledge allegiance in a school named after the architects of their internment? I would think not. Because we recognize that names carry weight. Names shape perception. Names have power.
Yet across Alabama, across the South, we still expect our children to sit in classrooms, to dream, to rise—while the very walls around them whisper, Know your place.This isn’t history. This is now. Schools named after Robert E. Lee, J.E.B. Stuart, and others weren’t built in the 1800s. No, they were erected in the heart of the 20th century, long after the Civil War, as a direct response to the Civil Rights Movement. These names were chosen with intention. They were planted like landmines, meant to remind us that while laws may change, power does not surrender easily. J.E.B. Stuart high school in Virginia has been renamed Justice High School. Lee High School, in what its said to be the most progressive city in Alabama, has survived every move to get the name changed. Perchance the mindset of those who put it in place is alive and well. The wish to hold the name and what it stands for seems more desirable than the true intent to move beyond. With that, I quote the words of Dr. Martin King, Jr. in his Letter From A Birmingham Jail, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
Some will always say, “It’s just a name.” But the truth is, names have always been tools of control. That’s why enslaved people had their names erased. That’s why schools, streets, and institutions were named to honor those who upheld white mental impoverishment (I do not use the term white supremacy on purpose as there is nothing supreme about it) . That’s why the fight to reclaim names, to rename spaces, is a battle for dignity and a strong nod toward justice. It is not enough to say we have moved past the inglorious past when it still creeps among us, etched in bronze, carved into stone, stitched onto letterman jackets, and typed on diplomas. A better nation is not one that simply acknowledges wrongs—it is one that corrects them. It’s past time for change. Rename the schools. Reposition the monuments to treason. Confront the truth, not for comfort, but for justice. Anything we are seeing in today’s climate – and we are seeing it, is a direct result of seeds planted…and nourished. If we are to truly move forward exemplifying an honorable legacy, we must cease laboring under the weight of those who chained us to the past.
Notes of A Native Son 