WEST POINT, New York (Michigan News Source) – On Monday, The U.S. Military Academy (USMA), West Point, located off the Hudson in New York announced its decision to remove all of its remnants of the Civil War’s Confederacy including its most prominent generals from the campus’ historic grounds.
After an October directive from the Department of Defense that ordered the 213 year old institution to address racial injustice and do away with any installation that “honors or commemorates the Confederacy or a person who served voluntarily with the Confederacy,” the USMA will begin work to deal with 13 confederate assets and memorabilia by removing, renaming, and storing them by Dec. 2023. Progress on the process can be found on the academy’s website.
A previous authorization, was to ensure that a commission be established “relating to assigning, modifying, or removing of names, symbols, displays, monuments, and paraphernalia to assets of the Department of Defense that commemorate the Confederate States of America or any person who served voluntarily with the Confederate States of America,” according to the USMA.
The report depicts numerous Confederate related roads, buildings, and other references at the USMA and the U.S. Naval Academy (USNA) located in Annapolis, MD. The Chesapeake Bay Magazine reported the total cost of renaming all of the confederate leader related places at the USMA totals $425,000, and renaming costs at the USNA are more than $25,000.
Of the 13 identified confederate pieces, some of the most prominent include a painting of General E. Lee dressed in his Confederate uniform from its library, a stone bust of the general from the Reconciliation Plaza, and his quote about honor will be taken down from the academy’s Honor Plaza, according to the ArmyTimes. Additionally, a set of three bronze panels more than 10 feet tall and half as wide, which include a timeline of significant events and figures from the nation’s history, will be removed for featuring General Lee and other confederates, but also an armed man in a hood with “Ku Klux Klan” written below.
While the report includes more than half a dozen recommendations regarding Lee, who graduated second in his 1829 class and later served as superintendent prior to the Civil War, several other confederate officers including P.G.T. Beauregard and William Hardee will have locations named after them renamed.
These decisions could possibly reignite debates about the Allendale Township Veteran’s Garden of Honor, which contains numerous statues representing soldiers from the town who have fought in major U.S. wars. In recent years, some began to petition to have the Civil War statue removed, which includes a Confederate statue as part of a larger Civil War Memorial monument. In 2021, town officials decided to let it remain.
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