The Civil War ended over one-hundred-fifty years ago. It’s time for those who are still fighting for their dead cause to finally surrender. 

This week has seen not one or two, but three crushing blows to the racist cause of the Confederacy.

First, Governor Northam brought down the statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee from the streets of Virginia’s capital city. Second, Prince William County’s Superintendent Dr. Steve Walts (who recently found himself surrounded by controversy of his own making) announced that they would (finally) be changing the name of Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas. And finally, at the request of Mayor Levar Stoney, the Richmond City Council voted unanimously to remove all the Confederate monuments on Monument Avenue.

Northam and Walts’s gestures were performative and meant to distract from their previous scandals and controversies. They could have made these changes at any time, but they chose to wait. Why? Because they are part of the problem. Let’s not forget that Northam did blackface (likely on multiple occasions), and he attempted to build a pipeline through a historically Black community. Walts’s announcement comes after years of people speaking up and demanding they change the name of the school (myself included). Additionally, he was heavily involved in the creation of Colgan High School’s controversial boundaries, which were so segregated that the United States Department of Justice had to get involved.

Why did they wait to act until our nation was faced with national unrest because of the public lynching of hundreds of Black men, women, and children? They do not deserve praise for their actions but condemnation for their hesitation to do what is right.

This is only the start. It’s time for us to recognize the Confederacy for what it was: a rebellion against our nation that fought to preserve slavery. These men are not heroes; they’re traitors, and anyone who believes otherwise cannot call themselves patriotic. 

Our nation is facing unrest that it hasn’t seen in decades, and it will not stop until there is change. One place it needs to start is by destroying these monuments and reducing the names of Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and Jefferson Davis to what they truly are: not heroes but racist traitors to our nation. These monuments and statues were created long after the war ended with the sole purpose of intimidating and causing pain to Black people, and there is no amount of historical context that makes that acceptable. They are not part of history; they are part of an attack on Black people and nothing more. 

For too long, the losing side has controlled the narrative and white-washed our nation’s history, pushing their fraudulent stories of a nonexistent noble fight against nonexistent tyranny. They say, “The South will rise again.” But the Confederacy never truly fell, and it’s time for that to change. 

It is time to abandon the false history that was written by white supremacist groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy. It is time to face the truth and come to terms with our nation’s past and present. Only then can we talk about our future. And if we fail to do so, this nation may not have a future at all.