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In an unusual trial, the N.A.A.C.P. has sought to show a school board’s “racist intent” by proving that the names of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson can’t be separated from white supremacy.
Dec. 23, 2025Updated 5:43 p.m. ET
On a crisp, cold morning in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia this month, a federal judge listened as lawyers argued over racism, the Confederacy and who deserves to be honored through historical memory.
The trial, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, was ostensibly about whether a school board violated the rights of Black students when it reinstated the names of two schools that once honored the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson after they’d been replaced in 2020.
But when arguments ended last week, it was clear that the case, Virginia State Conference N.A.A.C.P. et al. v. County School Board of Shenandoah County, represented something much larger. Hanging over five days of proceedings was the question of how the nation moved from the racial reckoning of 2020, when Confederate memorials were purged from the public square, to 2025, when President Trump led the Confederacy’s historical retrenchment — and whether the fight over historical awareness still has life in it.
That’s because part of the plaintiffs’ strategy for assailing the renamed Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary was to put the Confederacy itself on trial, not on the usual culture war battlefields of social media or television, but in a court of law. (Turner Ashby was also a Confederate commander.)
“The evidence will show that the school board named that school for Stonewall Jackson — a prominent Confederate general well known for fighting to preserve slavery — to make it very clear that Black students were not welcome,” Kaitlin Banner, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in her opening statement.
The lawyers representing the Shenandoah County School Board had a different task: to show that Lee and Jackson were worthy of being celebrated for traits not defined by the Confederacy’s racist ideology. That way, they could cast doubt that the names were reinstated with racist intent. One of the lawyers, Jim Guynn, hit many of those points in his questioning, suggesting that Lee was “the only West Point cadet to finish with no demerits” (he wasn’t), and that Jackson taught his enslaved workers to read (he did).
