(08-11-2014 08:25 PM)VA49er Wrote:  Washinton and Lee University is a university located in Lexington, VA. As it's name hints, it is named after Robert E. Lee. Now, some african american law students have made a list of demands of which include:

Now, you'd think a campus with a namesake buried in an on campus chapel would know before applying to said campus that there may be a few confedeate flags in the chapel.

This is beyond stupid. If ths students don't want to see a flag in the chapel then how about just staying out of the chapel? Lee's connection to the school is well documented and that association should be of no surprise to applicants.

BTW, the university bowed to the demands of these twelve students and removed the flags. Again, stupid.

Don't even get me started about this kind of stupidity. People need to go back and read the memoirs of Gen. Lee and other Virginians during the time. The Virginians initially, and later many of the CSA, knew they would eventually have to move away from slavery. That doesn't mean they didn't support slavery, as was an accepted practice of the time...heck, the US Capitol was built, in part, by slave labor. This was a very complex issue of the time and many of the buildings, schools, and monuments of today are named for people that have in some way supported this institution.

But, more than that, people ignore the overt discrimination of the North and Western territories at the time. Many of these governments treated blacks the same as their southern counterparts, except they didn't own them. Many of the states had laws whose aims were to keep blacks out of their state. Everyone likes to focus on slavery when talking about the civil war and how wonderful the Union the was, but things were a bit more complicated than that.