Black students will suffer psychological harm if they walk into a building named for Stonewall Jackson, a liberal judge said.
Two Virginia schools are violating the rights of black students simply by being named after Confederate leaders, according to a federal judge appointed by President Barack Obama.
Judge Michael Urbanski sided with the Virginia NAACP and ordered Shenandoah County to rename Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School. The school board previously changed the names in 2020, only for new leaders to revert to the previous names in 2024.
The Confederate names “violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act,” Judge Urbanski wrote in his order.
He said the schools must change their names in order to remove “the vestiges of segregation embedded in Shenandoah County’s public school system.”
In his opinion, he said the names further racism. He also relied on the testimony of a supposed expert who argued that black children will have worse mental health outcomes if the schools are named after Confederate leaders.
Judge Urbanski wrote:
After a thorough review of the impact of the restoration of the Confederate school names, the court concludes that the decision to reinstate the names imposes a disproportionate burden on Black students in Shenandoah County by subjecting them to race-based educational, psychological, and dignitary harms that their White peers do not bear…
…The historical record is clear that the Shenandoah County School Board named their
newly-constructed high school after Stonewall Jackson in 1959 in furtherance of Massive Resistance to desegregation. Though Black students are no longer literally excluded from public schools, to them the choice to resurrect a Confederate name in 2024 invokes the same message of exclusion that the name carried when it was first given to the school.