KILLEEN, Texas (AP) - In the wake of the deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, the argument over Confederate memorials has reached a fever pitch, and some Central Texas residents say that Fort Hood - one of the largest military posts in the world and a garrison named in honor of Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood - should be renamed.
“We named a U.S. military base for a Confederate, someone who fought to destroy the United States,” said 44-year-old Riakos Adams, secretary of the Killeen chapter of the NAACP and a 22-year Army veteran. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
The Dallas Morning News reports Fort Hood, 60 miles north of Austin, opened in 1942 and is one of 10 U.S. Army installations named after Confederate leaders. It employs more than 60,000 people.
Since Charlottesville, a movement to change the names of military installations that honor Confederate leadership has gained steam. Almost two dozen House Democrats recently sent a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis urging him to re-evaluate the names.
“These designations only serve to promote a dark and divisive time in our history and do not uphold the best of our country,” the letter states.
By most accounts, Hood was a daring commander who did not mince words about the cause of the Civil War. The North was fighting for the “freedom of the negro, and the independence of the Southern Confederacy was the only means to avoid the immediate abolition of slavery,” Hood said at a soldiers’ reunion seven years after the war ended.
Despite Hood’s defense of slavery, some residents of Bell County, where Fort Hood is located, think the name should not be changed.
“Renaming Fort Hood, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Nancy Boston, the 77-year-old Bell County Republican Party chair. “Some people are still angry at the white man for slavery. That’s just how the world was back then.”
Gary Bledsoe, Texas NAACP president, said that Boston’s “product of its time” argument misses the point.
“Gen. Hood took up arms against the United States. He took up arms to defend slavery,” Bledsoe said. “A large percentage of the personnel at Fort Hood are African-American. What message does naming a base after him send to them?
“It’s time we admitted the historical truth and got past this. You can’t honor the Confederacy and expect to have unity in this country,” he added.
Fort Hood officials declined to comment, but military leaders have been quick to denounce racism.
Retired Army colonel and Bell County resident Ralph Gauer, who is white, said that the name Fort Hood does not evoke the image of a Confederate general to most citizens. It’s simply what people call the post, he said.
“The name doesn’t remind soldiers of the Confederacy, the name reminds people of the men and women who have trained here,” Gauer said. “That includes spectacular black units, like the 761st tank battalion.”
The all-black tank unit distinguished itself in combat during World War II, when the Army was racially segregated. The Army integrated in 1948, three years after the war ended.
Joseph Dawson, professor of American military history at Texas A&M University in College Station, said that Army installations were named after Confederate leaders in an attempt to soothe Southern whites’ bruised feelings more than half a century after the South’s devastating defeat in the Civil War.
“The natural question is to ask why would that name be picked and the purpose of it, not only the purpose in the sense of recognizing an individual who was thought to be important but as a continuation of sectional reconciliation,” Dawson said.
Since the Charlottesville rally, which centered on one of the town’s Confederate statues, dozens of cities around the nation have started the process of removing Confederate memorials, which many professional historians say were erected during the Jim Crow and civil rights eras to further the ideals of white supremacy.
The Dallas Independent School District board of trustees announced that the district will consider changing the names of Robert E. Lee Elementary and Stonewall Jackson Elementary, and Dallas City Council members declared that they would work to take down the community’s collection of Confederate monuments. Thousands rallied in August, at Dallas City Hall, to that end.
Rep. Eric Johnson, D-Dallas, echoed the argument of some on Fort Hood in a recent letter to the State Preservation Board, which oversees the Capitol grounds and the several Confederate monuments that are there.
“The Confederacy exemplified treason against the United States and white supremacy. Texans do not extol treason against the United States or white supremacy as values,” Johnson wrote.
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Information from: The Dallas Morning News, https://www.dallasnews.com
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