Decency demands renaming Fort Bragg, other military sites named for Confederates
Fort Bragg, N.C., is among the U.S. Army’s most storied sites: it is the home of the famed 82nd Airborne Division and headquarters of the Special Operations Command.
But Fort Bragg also is one of 10 Army sites named for Confederate officers — people who could be viewed as traitors to the United States.
The word “traitors” may sting.
But couldn’t it accurately describe Braxton Bragg and others who commanded Confederate units in the war to preserve slavery?
Bragg and many other major Confederate military leaders owned slaves, and they were ardent defenders of “the unique institution” that caused the Civil War.
Near Fayetteville, Fort Bragg encompasses 251 square miles in four N.C. counties. Pope Air Force Base was folded into the Army complex in 2011 — the same year that Fort McPherson, Ga., closed and other commands relocated to Bragg.
Dubious history
How was an artillery training facility that was built in 1918 named for a Confederate general?
Fifty years after the Civil War ended in 1865, people of color, women and other religious and ethnic minorities were still viewed as second-class citizens unworthy of equal rights or treatment.
The murderous Ku Klux Klan was on the rise, and lynchings of black people were common; in addition, the plagues of xenophobia and anti-Semitism were prevalent all across our country.
Woodrow Wilson was president in 1918 when Camp Bragg was built in the shadows of World War I, and his administration’s white supremacist policies — which included segregating federal workers and removing black supervisors from better-paying jobs — set the groundwork for someone like Braxton Bragg to have his name emblazoned on a military site.
A Warrenton, N.C., native, Bragg was a graduate of West Point and an Army officer for 19 years before resigning to buy a Louisiana sugar cane plantation with his wife; together, the couple owned 105 slaves.
Largely disliked
The irony is that as a Confederate general, Bragg was largely disliked by soldiers and officers under his command, and numerous military historians have been critical of his battlefield strategy.
Indeed at one point during the Civil War, Jefferson Davis — the president of the Confederate States of America — relieved Bragg of command and reassigned Bragg to serve as one of his military advisers in Richmond, Va., the Confederate capital.
Other segregationists whose names remain on bases include Henry Lewis Benning (who maintained that black people were suited only for slavery), John Brown Gordon (a KKK leader in Georgia) and George Pickett (who was born into a slaveholding family and earned infamy as a Confederate general who oversaw the execution of captured Union soldiers).
In South Carolina, Fort Jackson, the venerable Army training installation, isn’t named after Confederate Gen. Stonewall Jackson; rather it’s named in honor of former President Andrew Jackson, who was a general during the War of 1812.
Affront to America
It is an affront to our country to have the names of white supremacists on military facilities in today’s America.
It is long overdue to remove these names, and rename these military locations in honor of far more worthy military leaders like Gen. George C. Marshall (who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953) and Gen. Omar Bradley (a World War II hero who later became the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff).
It’s time to right this wrong.
This story was originally published July 24, 2020 at 1:00 AM.