West Point is driving the Confederates off campus: The prestigious military academy on the Hudson, where Ulysses Grant, Douglas MacArthur and Dwight Eisenhower studied, has started a process that will result in the removal of the racist and slaveholder symbols over the next few months South.
When West Point’s 4,600 cadets return to school after the Christmas break, they will no longer find a portrait of General Robert Lee in a Confederate uniform in the library, announced Academy Superintendent General Steven Gilland. Also to be removed is a stone bust of Lee, a West Point graduate who was also the academy’s superintendent before leading the Confederate Army during the Civil War.
In all, West Point has identified a dozen memorials, or objects, reminiscent of the Confederate cause: they will be emplaced in the early months of 2023. Underneath, a large bronze triptych currently mounted at the entrance to Bartlett Science Hall disappears: it depicts figures and symbols from American history, including alongside abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, and Francis Scott Key, who wrote the national anthem, also relieved a minor member of the Ku Klux Klan.
At West Point, Confederate symbols emerged decades after the Civil War, beginning in the 1930s, when the Revisionist “lost cause” doctrine attempted to portray the Southern insurrection in romantic terms of heroism and chivalry. Streets and buildings on campus were then named in honor of Confederate leaders like William Hardee or Pierre-Gustave Beauregard, the general who started the bloody war against the North by attacking Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. The West Point Initiative is responding to a Pentagon order to remove or replace objects “commemorating the Confederacy or those who volunteered to serve in its ranks.”
West Point cadets will continue to study the Civil War in all its complexities, and the intent — declared a commission charged with the census of Confederate symbols — is not to “erase history” but “teach future military leaders of America to promote our best national.” ideals”.
West Point is the latest institution to revisit memorials and memorials created to honor people who went to war to perpetuate slavery following protests following the killing of African-American George Floyd. More than 230 people have been removed since May 2020, when Floyd choked under the knee of a white police officer, according to a census conducted by the Southern Poverty Law Center.