A Virginia school board that voted last month to restore the names of Confederate generals to a pair of local public schools was sued Tuesday for allegedly violating the civil rights of Black students.
The NAACP and the parents of five students accused the Shenandoah County school board of sending a "discriminatory and harmful message of Black inferiority and subjugation" by changing the names of Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School in Quicksburg.
"There's a cold wind blowing in America and it has especially chilled Shenandoah County," the Rev. Cozy Bailey, the Virginia NAACP president, said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit, National Public Radio reported.
The school board didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, NPR said.
The 62-page federal lawsuit seeks a court order requiring the board to "remove the Confederate names and mascots, and to prevent any future naming involving Confederate leaders or references to the Confederacy."
Mountain View was formerly named Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run was formerly named Ashby Lee Elementary School after Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby.
Those names were "retired" in July 2020 following global protests over the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis and a request by then-Virginia Secretary of Education Atif Qarni for local officials to change any school names that memorialized Confederate leaders or sympathizers, according to Tuesday's lawsuit.
But on May 9, the Shenandoah County school board voted 5-1 to restore the previous names, which dated to 1959.
During a heated meeting before the vote, supporters of the move argued that removing the Confederate names was an effort to rewrite history that went against the wishes of the community, while opponents said restoring them would brand the county as backward and racist, according to NPR.
