A judge rules Confederate school names in Shenandoah County must be changed. He also says the case is ‘unique’ and doesn’t apply to Confederate names elsewhere.

At the time, Shenandoah County had no high school for Black students; any Black students who wanted to attend high school were bused out of the county, typically to Harrisonburg. Brian Daugherity, a history professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, studied the minutes of Shenandoah County School Board meetings during that era and testified that “the naming of Stonewall Jackson High School was undertaken by the Shenandoah County School Board, in part, to dissuade [Black] students from requesting transfers into the newly constructed and newly opened high school.” In the aftermath of that, the Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to retire the names Stonewall Jackson and Ashby-Lee. The School Board also named another school, Ashby-Lee Elementary School, in 1974, following an active period of federal school integration enforcement.” “The causal link is clear,” he wrote, “Shenandoah County’s Confederate school names are traceable to the de jure system of segregation in Shenandoah County.”