A federal judge has ordered a Virginia school board to strip Confederate names from two schools, overriding a 5-1 vote by locally elected board members who restored the names in 2024 at their community's request.
For ordinary Americans, the stakes are simple: if a locally elected board can't name its own schools because a federal judge disagrees with the choice, the word "democracy" has lost its meaning.
Shenandoah County's school board voted in 2024 to change Mountain View High School back to Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary back to Ashby-Lee Elementary — combining the names of Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate cavalry officer Turner Ashby. The vote reversed a 2020 decision, made under pressure of nationwide protests, to strip the original names. Board members said they were honoring popular community sentiment and that the previous board had ignored constituents and due process when it removed the names.
That wasn't enough for the Virginia NAACP, which sued in June 2024 on behalf of six students and their parents. Black students make up less than 3% of the school system's enrollment. The NAACP argued those students would be "required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement."
U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski sided with the NAACP. In an opinion filed Thursday, he ruled the board's vote violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. Confederate names are "vestiges" of the county's segregationist history, he wrote — and restoring them deliberately was worse than leaving old names in place.
"The Confederate names were restored with complete awareness of their historic legacy and ongoing discriminatory impact," Urbanski wrote. "In the court's view, the affirmative act of reinstating these vestiges of segregation is far more problematic than a passive failure to remove a long-standing name or symbol."
He ordered the board to choose new names "on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed" — the same language federal courts used to compel desegregation in the 1950s.
The NAACP called it "a decisive victory." Rev. Cozy Bailey, the organization's state president, said the board's decision "is impossible to explain except through the lens of race." Kaitlin Banner, deputy legal director at the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs, which represented the NAACP, said the court acknowledged that such names "inflict real, racially disproportionate harm."
Both WJLA and HuffPost ran essentially the same Associated Press wire copy, framing the ruling as a civil rights triumph. Neither outlet gave weight to the community's argument — that the 2020 removals were rammed through without proper process and that the 2024 vote was a course correction by representatives answering to their constituents. That explanation appeared at the bottom of both stories, well after the NAACP's framing had set the tone. The county's attorney, Jim Guynn, did not respond to requests for comment.
The ruling comes as the Trump administration has moved to restore Confederate statues removed in 2020 and push back on efforts to reframe American history in museums, national parks, and classrooms. But in Shenandoah County, a federal judge has made clear that local voters don't get the final word on their own community's heritage.
The question now is whether the school board appeals — and whether the people who spent the last election cycle lecturing the country about "democracy" will defend the right of a community to make its own choices when those choices displease the establishment.
