A Virginia school district that restored Confederate names to two of its schools in 2024—four years after removing them as racially discriminatory symbols—must change those names again, a federal judge has ordered.
In a 141-page opinion issued Thursday, Judge Michael Urbanski said the Shenandoah County school board violated the U.S. Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment and multiple federal civil rights laws when it reversed a previous board’s decision and brought back the names of Stonewall Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary schools.
The board had renamed those schools Mountain View High and Honey Run Elementary in 2020 after passing a resolution condemning racism following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, and following calls from Virginia’s education secretary and governor to remove Confederate names from schools.
While proponents of restoring the Confederate names—which refer to the generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee and Officer Turner Ashby—cited a rushed process and claimed most community members supported the original names, Urbanski said the board’s 2024 decision carried “discriminatory intent.”
“This is not a case in which historical names were left in place ‘in spite of’ their effects on Black students,” wrote Urbanski, an appointee of former President Barack Obama. “Rather, this is a case in which the School Board deliberately chose to return to the Confederate names just four years after they were removed—expressly because they were racially discriminatory.”
The judge ordered the 5,700-student school district’s board to remove the Confederate names and adopt new ones “on a racially nondiscriminatory basis with all deliberate speed”—quoting the Brown v. Board of Education ruling in which the Supreme Court ordered an end to racially segregated schools. He also called for a “community-driven consensus rather than a protracted, expensive legal battle” to resolve the matter.
It’s unclear when the schools might receive new names.
Jim Guynn Jr., an attorney who represented the school system in the case, said in an email that an appeal is likely.
“We are disappointed in the court’s ruling,” he said. “It was clear during the litigation that whichever side the judge ruled against would likely appeal. I have no reason to believe that the school district’s intention in this regard has changed.”
Those who brought the case celebrated Urbanski’s ruling.
“For decades, the practice of honoring Confederate leaders in Virginia schools has been steeped in a history of racial discrimination,” the Rev. Cozy Bailey, president of the NAACP Virginia State Conference, said in a statement. “The School Board’s 2024 renaming decision is impossible to explain except through the lens of race.”
Dozens of schools removed Confederate names
2020 brought a burst of momentum to efforts to remove Confederate names from schools. Since late June 2020, at least 58 schools previously named for Confederate figures have received new names and still have them, according to an Education Week analysis.
Shenandoah County is one of at least two school districts that changed school names, then later restored Confederate names, affecting four schools.
Shenandoah County’s board turned over in the time between the 2020 and 2024 votes to include mostly proponents of restoring the schools’ original names. In that time, board members also replaced their legal counsel and worked closely with local groups in support of changing the names back.
In his opinion, Urbanski reviews the history of both schools, pointing to their origins in the district’s resistance to racial integration after the Brown v. Board decision in 1954. Stonewall Jackson High School was built in the late 1950s to serve white students exclusively—the Confederate flag was flown over the construction site—during the period of Massive Resistance, when many Virginia school districts refused to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The adjacent Ashby-Lee Elementary School was built and named in the 1970s as the district opposed the federal government’s stepped-up efforts to integrate schools, Urbanski notes, citing an expert witness’ testimony that the name was chosen in part to discourage Black families from attending.
In 2024, as the Shenandoah County board prepared to vote on restoring those names, some board members raised concerns about the process that led up to the 2020 vote, when some in the community called for a delay. But Urbanski dismissed those procedural concerns.
From the video of the hours-long, May 2024 meeting when the board voted 5-1 to restore the Confederate names, Urbanski writes, “it is clear that what happened then was not solely driven by concerns over the 2020 process. Rather, this evidence reveals that the School Board’s action in 2024 was outcome driven—to restore the Confederate names.”
The Virginia chapter of the NAACP and the parents of five students who attend the high school sued the school district in June 2024, and Urbanski previously ruled that the high school’s renaming violated students’ free speech rights, making them “mobile billboards” for the Stonewall Jackson name.
