Retired Army General and former CIA Director David Petraeus has joined the growing chorus of people calling for the military to remove the names of Confederate officers from military installations.
Writing in The Atlantic on Tuesday, Petraeus notes that he served stints in many of the 10 bases, including at Fort Bragg in North Carolina and Fort Benning in Georgia. Fort Bragg is named after Gen. Braxton Bragg who served without much distinction in the Civil War, while Gen. Henry Benning was an ardent supporter of slavery, Petraeus notes.
He writes that during the time he served he did not "think about the messages those names sent to the many African Americans serving on these installations — messages that should have been noted by all of us."
The men have since come to be "so shrouded in tradition that everything about them seemed rock solid, time tested, immortal," he said.
And while as a cadet at West Point in the early 1970s, the techniques of Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson were widely admired. They were not, however, encouraged to think about the causes the men fought for. Lee's name is emblazoned at the acadamy on "a gate, a road, an entire housing area, and a barracks," he notes, the last of which was built in the 1960s.
Monuments of Confederate leaders have been either coming down or plans have been made to do so throughout the country in the wake of protests in response to the killing of George Floyd. A statue of a noted slave trader was torn down by protesters in England and tossed into a nearby harbor.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.