Rename All the Bases

Jamie Malankowski makes the case in the New York Times for renaming US military bases that honor Confederate military leaders.

Malankowski highlights the careers and views of some of the Confederates who are honored by having bases named after them,

Fort Benning in Georgia is named for Henry Benning, a State Supreme Court associate justice who became one of Lee’s more effective subordinates. Before the war, this ardent secessionist inflamed fears of abolition, which he predicted would inevitably lead to black governors, juries, legislatures and more. “Is it to be supposed that the white race will stand for that?” Benning wrote. “We will be overpowered and our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth, and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination.”

Another installation in Georgia, Fort Gordon, is named for John B. Gordon, one of Lee’s most dependable commanders in the latter part of the war. Before Fort Sumter, Gordon, a lawyer, defended slavery as “the hand-maid of civil liberty.” After the war, he became a United States senator, fought Reconstruction, and is generally thought to have headed the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. He “may not have condoned the violence employed by Klan members,” says his biographer, Ralph Lowell Eckert, “but he did not question or oppose it when he felt it was justified.”

. . .

All these installations date from the buildups during the world wars, and naming them in honor of a local military figure was a simple choice. But that was a time when the Army was segregated and our views about race more ignorant. Now African-Americans make up about a fifth of the military. The idea that today we ask any of these soldiers to serve at a place named for a defender of a racist slavocracy is deplorable; the thought that today we ask any American soldier to serve at a base named for someone who killed United States Army troops is beyond absurd. Would we have a Fort Rommel? A Camp Cornwallis?

It is odd how this stuff still plays out 150 years later, such as in the ongoing controversy over monuments and other honors to Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest in places like Tennessee.

Prior to the Civil War, Forrest was a wealthy slave trader. During the Civil War, troops under his command committed one of the most infamous atrocities of the war by massacring Union soldiers who surrendered at the battle of Fort Pillow. After the Civil War, he was one of the early members of the Ku Klux Klan and was by some accounts its first Grand Wizard.

Yet, according to Wikipedia there are no less than 32 historical markers in Tennessee alone dedicated to Forrest and July 13 is officially designated as Nathan Bedford Forrest day in the state.