WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump, overruling his own Pentagon chief, declared Wednesday that he will not entertain the idea of removing the names of Confederate generals such as Robert E. Lee from 10 Army posts, including Fort Hood in Texas, the nation’s largest military installation.
“That is an absolute nonstarter for the president,” White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnerny told reporters at a briefing.
“Fort Bragg is known for the heroes within it, that train there, that deployed from there. And it’s an insult to say to the men and women who left there — the last thing they saw on American soil before going overseas, and in some cases losing their lives — to tell them that what they left was inherently a racist institution because of a name. That’s unacceptable to the president, and rightfully so.”
The announcement comes just two days after the Pentagon abandoned decades of resistance, with Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy saying they “open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic” — a shift welcomed by civil rights advocates.
That announcement came two weeks into nationwide demonstrations against police brutality and racism, and backlash against Trump’s demands for a federal military response to quash protests in cities around the country.
Three months ago, the Marine Corps banned Confederate symbols as part of an effort to root out white supremacy in the ranks and to end ongoing offense to black personnel. McCarthy said at the time that the Army would not reassess the use of Confederate names.
Pressure has built on the military, and on states and cities, since the May 25 death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, where a police officer pinned Floyd’s neck to the ground with his knee for nearly nine minutes.
Fort Hood, the largest U.S. military installation in the world, is named for Gen. John Bell Hood. He graduated from West Point, where the U.S. Army trains future officers and where Trump will deliver a commencement address on Saturday.
When Hood’s home state, Kentucky, declared itself neutral during the Civil War, he moved to Texas, where he took command of the Confederacy’s Texas Brigade.
“Gen. Hood was a traitor, one of the worst generals in the Civil War,” Domingo Garcia, a Dallas lawyer who serves as president of the League of United Latin American Citizens, told The Dallas Morning News on Tuesday. “That was a shameful episode in American history in terms of the Confederacy and what it stood for.
LULAC has been pressing to rename Fort Hood for Sgt. Roy Benavidez, a legendary Mexican American Green Beret who survived an especially rough battle during the Vietnam War in 1968, saving eight comrades despite heavy enemy fire and his own severe injuries. President Ronald Reagan awarded him a Medal of Honor in 1981.
Retired Army general and former CIA Director David Petraeus, writing Tuesday in The Atlantic, embraced the move to abandon “legacies of systemic racism” by stripping the Confederates’ names off the forts.
“We do not live in a country to which Braxton Bragg, Henry L. Benning, or Robert E. Lee can serve as an inspiration,” he wrote. “The way we resolve these issues will define our national identity for this century and beyond.”
Despite long-festering complaints, the Pentagon has resisted such change. The issue has become a cultural and political flash point, and the idea of eradicating the names of Hood, Lee and others was met with dismay by the Sons of Confederate Veterans.
The group’s commander-in-chief, Paul Gramling, a retired postal worker from Shreveport, La., argued Monday night that the Pentagon was “kowtowing” to forces of political correctness, noting that decades-old names of military posts had nothing to do with a police killing in Minnesota, far north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“When these bases were named it was after the war,” he said. “Like Gen. Lee and so many others, even though they were a quote-unquote ‘enemy’ at one time, they respected them. It’s called respect and you don’t see that today, anywhere, hardly.”
The 218,000-acre Fort Hood, near Killeen, opened in 1942. It’s home to III Corps and roughly 40,000 soldiers.
And it’s one of 10 Army installations, all in the old South — Virginia, North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama — named for Confederate generals, a fact that has long rankled civil rights leaders and black soldiers serving their country at sites named for warriors who fought, among other things, to keep their ancestors enslaved.
The list includes other important Army posts:
• Fort Benning in Georgia, named for one of that state’s leading advocates of secession.
• Fort Bragg in North Carolina, home of the famed 82nd Airborne Division, named for a West Point graduate who fought for the South.
• Fort Polk in Louisiana, home to the Joint Readiness Training Center, which trains soldiers for overseas deployment. Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk fought under Bragg before he was killed in 1864 as the Union marched on Atlanta.
Other Army posts named for Confederate generals include Camp Beauregard, a training site for the Louisiana National Guard. Gen. Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, another West Pointer who renounced his commission in the Union Army, led the defense of Charleston, S.C. The shelling of Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, by troops under his command marked the start of the Civil War.
Virginia’s Fort Lee, outside the state capital of Richmond, which also served as capital of the Confederacy, honors Gen. Robert E. Lee, the South’s top general and the Union’s adversary at the battles of Gettysburg and Bull Run and other bloody sites in a war that claimed 750,000 lives on both sides.
