On a crisp, cold morning in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia this month, a federal judge listened as lawyers argued over racism, the Confederacy and who deserves to be honored through historical memory.
The trial, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Virginia, was ostensibly about whether a school board violated the rights of Black students when it reinstated the names of two schools that once honored the Confederate generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson after they’d been replaced in of 2020.
But when arguments ended last week, it was clear that the case, Virginia State Conference N.A.A.C.P. et al. v. County School Board of Shenandoah County, represented something much larger. Hanging over five days of proceedings was the question of how the nation moved from the racial reckoning of 2020, when Confederate memorials were purged from the public square, to 2025, when President Trump led the Confederacy’s historical retrenchment — and whether the fight over historical awareness still has life in it.
That’s because part of the plaintiffs’ strategy for assailing the renamed Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary was to put the Confederacy itself on trial, not on the usual culture war battlefields of social media or television, but in a court of law. (Turner Ashby was also a Confederate commander.)
“The evidence will show that the school board named that school for Stonewall Jackson — a prominent Confederate general well known for fighting to preserve slavery — to make it very clear that Black students were not welcome,” Kaitlin Banner, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said in her opening statement.
The lawyers representing the Shenandoah County School Board had a different task: to show that Lee and Jackson were worthy of being celebrated for traits not defined by the Confederacy’s racist ideology. That way, they could cast doubt that the names were reinstated with racist intent. One of the lawyers, Jim Guynn, hit many of those points in his questioning, suggesting that Lee was “the only West Point cadet to finish with no demerits” (he wasn’t), and that Jackson taught his enslaved workers to read.
There was no “racist” or “discriminatory” intent in reinstating the name, Mr. Guynn said during his opening statement. And there was no impact on the “stellar” Black students who attended the schools with Confederate names, he said.
Segregation was not a proud moment, but it’s “in the past,” he continued.
To prove that the Black students of Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary were harmed by having the names restored, the plaintiffs sought to explain just what the Confederacy represented.
Lee and the Confederacy launched an armed rebellion and killed their fellow countrymen for the “protection and expansion” of chattel slavery, according to testimony from James Tyrus Seidule, a retired U.S. Army brigadier general and West Point professor emeritus of history.
Lionizing Lee and Jackson merely as courtly gentlemen or brilliant military men, as many of their champions do, evades a bigger point: the rebels fought for a racist ideology that they were not shy about articulating, Prof. Seidule argued.
Prof. Seidule pointed to an 1861 speech in which Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the Confederacy, said his new government’s cornerstone rests “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.”
Pressed repeatedly, the defense lawyers at times sounded as if their client were the antebellum South.
How would a man from Georgia, born in 1820, even know slavery was wrong, Mr. Guynn asked. Doesn’t he deserve grace?
“Grace belongs with the enslaved,” Prof. Seidule responded.
What about the fact that Jackson taught his enslaved workers to read the Bible?
That was so they could learn submission to a “master,” Prof. Seidule said.
Did Lee have any redeeming qualities? Mr. Guynn finally asked the witness.
Maybe as a husband or a father, Prof. Seidule responded.
Judge Michael Urbanski said it might take months for him to render a verdict, which he conceded was sure to be appealed. But the hearings, as Mr. Trump approaches the end of his first tumultuous year back in the White House, have had resonance in the closing weeks of 2025.
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Mr. Trump has made it a second-term mission to rewrite or downplay the history of racism in America. He has reinstalled a statue honoring a Confederate official near the Capitol grounds in Washington, and has reverted the names of recently rechristened military bases to their older Confederate titles (while technically naming them for other American soldiers with the same surnames as the rebel generals).
He has also promised to restore “truth and sanity to American history” by directing the removal of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution museums.
Like much of the country, Shenandoah County, which is about 90 percent white, was rocked by the June 2020 racial justice protests stemming from the high-profile killings of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, all unarmed Black people.
The school board passed a resolution proclaiming, “We urgently must act to stop the racial injustice that harms and anguishes Black people, who are our family, friends, neighbors, students, staff members and fellow Americans.”
It pledged to “stand steadfast in our commitment to foster an inclusive educational environment” and to fight for civil rights.
Stonewall Jackson High School would become Mountain View; Ashby-Lee Elementary would be Honey Run.
The backlash was immediate. Students from the newly named Mountain View High School waived a Confederate banner over an overpass in July 2020.
A contentious effort to reinstate the names in 2022 failed after a deadlocked vote by the school board. But with a board election looming in 2023, the issue did not go away
Voters elected three sympathetic board members, and on May 10, 2024, the school board voted to restore the Confederate names.
The school board’s lawyers say the reinstatement had no racist intent; it reflected the will of Shenandoah County residents who were proud of their history and attached to the name of their schools.
“People don’t like change,” Mr. Guynn said during his opening statement.
The courtroom fight is playing out as a microcosm of far broader battles rattling American society. As lawyers argued in Virginia, lawmakers at the U.S. Capitol last week were replacing Lee’s statue with a new statue of Barbara Rose Johns, a Black girl who, at 16, led a 1951 walkout of her segregated high school in Prince Edward County, Va. Some of the students there sued and their case became part of the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which struck down segregation in schools.
Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, said at the unveiling: “You can’t tell the story of Virginia without telling the story of Barbara Rose Johns. You can’t tell the story of the American civil rights movement.”
Meantime, over the weekend, conservative activists at a conclave of Turning Point U.S.A. in Arizona argued over the idea of “heritage Americans,” and whether such progeny of white, early arriving families have a greater claim to the nation than more recent immigrants.
Throughout the trial over the schools’ names, the plaintiffs’ lawyers tried to establish that the Confederate names harmed Black students. One such student, A.D. Carter, described feeling an “invisible ball and chain” weighing him down after the names were reinstated, according to one local news outlet.
Several juvenile plaintiffs, identified by pseudonyms, testified via video call while the judge cleared the courtroom audience.
On the last day of testimony, the defense called its final witness, Gloria Carlineo, a conservative school board member who voted in 2024 to reinstate the names and who said she had been motivated to run for office in 2023 after witnessing “indoctrination” at her son’s school.
In June 2020, she wrote an opinion piece calling Black Lives Matter “intrinsically racist” and accused the left of trying “to completely remove true Christian values from society.” The “Trojan horse of diversity and acceptance” was being used, she wrote, to push drug abuse and sexual immorality.
Ms. Carlineo said that she had “no feelings” one way or the other about Stonewall Jackson, but that her constituents felt he was important to history. The school board shouldn’t “erase” that, she added.
Outside the Harrisonburg, Va., courthouse where the trial took place is a plaque commemorating it as the location where the state’s first desegregation orders were made. In 1958, Gov. J. Lindsay Almond responded by using what became known as massive resistance laws to close schools that had been ordered to admit Black students. The Virginia Supreme Court and a special federal court declared the closures unconstitutional in January 1959.
That same year, Stonewall Jackson High School was built. It was segregated.
Clyde McGrady reports for The Times on how race and identity is shaping American culture. He is based in Washington.
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