The fort will be renamed to honor Pfc. Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero who earned the Silver Star and Purple Heart for his exceptional courage during the Battle of the Bulge in 1944. This namesake, I believe, is an improvement over the former Bragg, who is remembered for his poor temper and combative personality, and who briefly commanded the Army of Tennessee to partial victories at Perryville, Stones River, and Chickamauga before resigning in November 1863.
To be honest, I can’t stop laughing. Those in the Confederate heritage community got played. They placed their faith in a corrupt Northern businessman—the very thing their antebellum Southern ancestors feared.
They should have seen this coming.
The Lost Cause, a pro-Confederate narrative that frames the war as a defense of states’ rights, “loyal slaves,” and heroic Christian warriors, occupied a central place in the nation’s collective memory for much of the 20th century. The display of Confederate symbols in prominent public spaces remained largely unchallenged by both Democrats and Republicans as recently as the 1990s. In recent years, Democrats, as a result of their embrace of a more progressive agenda, have led the fight calling for the removal of symbols celebrating the Confederacy in public spaces, but even Republicans have gradually begun to distance themselves from the practice.
In 2010 Virginia Republican Gov. Robert McDonnell signed a proclamation declaring April “Confederate Heritage and History Month.” Protests ensued over the proclamation’s failure to acknowledge slavery as central to the war and the Confederacy, as well as its strong Lost Cause overtones. In addition to issuing an apology, McDonnell promised to sign a new proclamation the following year, which he did, declaring April “Civil War History in Virginia Month.” The proclamation recognized slavery as an “inhumane practice” and the Emancipation Proclamation as having “ended its evil stain on American democracy.”
In 2015, just weeks after the horrific murder of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist, the state’s Republican governor, Nikki Haley, called for the removal of a Confederate battle flag that had flown on the Statehouse grounds since 1962. Haley had previously embraced the Sons of Confederate Veterans, who viewed the flag as a symbol of “heritage” and not as a symbol of racism. She had bent over backward to reassure its members that their flag would not be removed, but in the wake of the murders and the publication of photographs of Dylann Roof posing with a Confederate flag, Haley and much of the Republican state Legislature voted to remove the flag once and for all.