It stands to reason that Woodrow Wilson would be the president to bring us Army bases named for traitors who waged war on this country with the goal of preserving slavery. He took office in 1913 with a team of white supremacists who announced themselves by requiring separate white and colored bathrooms in federal buildings. The Wilsonians inflicted a neo-Confederate regime on the capital that was felt in far corners of the nation.
North Carolina newspaperman Josephus Daniels had the bloodiest résumé in the Wilson Cabinet. A decade and a half before going to Washington, he was a principal instigator of a murderous coup in Wilmington with the goal of removing Black people from positions of authority in city government.
His Raleigh newspaper, The News & Observer, stoked white rage by equating Black political power with the rape of white women and trafficking in cartoons like one that depicted a giant black bat with "Negro rule" inscribed on its wings, a foot on a ballot box and white women trapped in its claws. On Nov. 10, 1898, throngs of white men burned and murdered at will, driving Black officials and their allies from Wilmington. The state Legislature then disenfranchised African Americans.
The coup was rooted in an influential civic religion known as the Lost Cause. The Lost Causers venerated racial terrorism as a means of suppressing Black political influence. They romanticized slavery, portraying African Americans who lived in chains as happy and well cared for. They recast the pro-slavery war as a just struggle for "states' rights" while elevating the dead Confederate general, Robert E. Lee, to the stature of a patron saint.
The Wilsonians were plying these waters when they gave Lee's name to Fort Lee in Virginia. The myth of the noble Confederate that was used to justify the naming honor was bankrupt from the start. Some rebel honorees were known at the time to be profoundly incompetent as soldiers and leaders. At least one honoree was a state Ku Klux Klan leader. Yet another, the execrable George Pickett, was a war criminal.
Lee is widely regarded as a brilliant tactician. But he also did nothing to stop his soldiers from systematically kidnapping free Black citizens into slavery. During the Gettysburg campaign, African Americans who found themselves in his army's path fled in large numbers to avoid being dragged south and sold at auction. Civil War diarist Rachel Cormany reported that some were hunted down by soldiers on horseback and herded into custody "just like we would drive cattle." In the eyes of these soldiers, every Black person was a runaway slave.
As recently as a decade ago, U.S. military officials stood by the anemic fiction that Confederate base names had nothing to do with race hatred. But that position rang hollow each time Confederate ideology figured in episodes of racist violence. The connection was crystal clear in 2015, when a gunman sought to instigate a race war by killing nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina.
Congress finally parted company with the myth of the noble Confederate in 2021. It overrode a presidential veto to order the Defense Department to rid its assets of "names, symbols, displays, monuments and paraphernalia" that commemorate the Confederate States of America. The legislation established a commission that brought forward new names for nine Army installations in the South.
The main event of the renaming project unfolded Thursday in Virginia, when Fort Lee was rechristened Fort Gregg-Adams. This change derives its emotional power from the fact that the saint of the lavishly racist Lost Cause is being replaced by two African Americans who served in the Army during the Jim Crow era.
Lt. Col. Charity Adams served with distinction during World War II as commander of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion in Europe. Her quietly dignified memoir, "One Woman's Army," offers a close view of the racism men and women in uniform faced both inside and outside the military.
While visiting her family in Columbia, South Carolina, she encountered hooded Ku Klux Klansmen who had turned out in force in an attempt to intimidate her father, who was the president of the local chapter of the NAACP. On another occasion, she was traveling in a first-class train car when an enraged white passenger demanded that a military police officer check her credentials. "That woman over there is wearing an officer's uniform," the passenger said, according to her memoir, "and I am sure she is an impostor. Why, she's a 'Negra.'" While stationed in Europe as a major, she was threatened with court-martial for standing her ground against a racist general who had insulted her. She nonetheless thrived, leaving the service in 1946 as the second-highest-ranking officer in the Women's Army Corps (formerly the Women's Auxiliary Army Corps).
Lt. Gen. Arthur Gregg commanded logistics units around the world and was among the African Americans who applied for training in 1948, the year President Harry Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which was supposed to end segregation in the armed forces. When he arrived as a second lieutenant two years later at Fort Lee, Gregg found himself barred from the whites-only officers' club, also named for the general. The camp commander was attempting to build a separate club for colored officers only, in open defiance of Truman's order, as the Black press reported soon afterward.
In the summer of 1951 — a full three years after the order — African American investigative journalist James L. Hicks reported that Fort Lee was running under Jim Crow rules, even requiring separate colored hours at its swimming pools. Hicks wrote pointedly that the base "named after Confederate general Robert E. Lee is actually being operated by Major R.C.L. Graham as though it is still one of the Confederate states and as if General Lee himself were its commanding officer."
Gregg is now 94 years old, and last week he returned triumphant to Fort Lee for a ceremony that changed the name of that officers' club to the Gregg-Adams Club.
The decision to expunge Confederate tributes from military assets reflects a welcome, if belated, declaration that the men who nearly destroyed the country in defense of the right to own humans are unworthy of federal veneration. That it took so long to reach this realization reflects the extent to which the lie of the Lost Cause still holds sway in the United States.
The New York Times