Democrats, NAACP want Fort Hood renamed

The Killeen military post is named for a Confederate general.

In the wake of deadly racially motivated violence in Charlottesville, Va., some Central Texas residents say that Fort Hood — one of the largest military posts in the world and a garrison named in honor of Confederate Gen. John Bell Hood — should be renamed.

“We named a U.S. military base for a Confederate, someone who fought to destroy the United States,” said 44-year-old Riakos Adams, secretary of the Killeen chapter of the NAACP and a 22-year Army veteran. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Fort Hood, 60 miles north of Austin, opened in 1942 and is one of 10 U.S. Army installations named after Confederate leaders. It employs more than 60,000 people.

Since the Charlottesville violence that left one person dead, a movement to change the names of military installations that honor Confederate leaders has gained steam. On Monday, almost two dozen House Democrats sent a letter to Defense Secretary James Mattis urging him to re-evaluate the names.

“These designations only serve to promote a dark and divisive time in our history and do not uphold the best of our country,” the letter states.

By most accounts, Hood was a daring commander who didn’t mince words about the cause of the Civil War. The North was fighting for the “freedom of the negro, and the independence of the Southern Confederacy was the only means to avoid the immediate abolition of slavery,” Hood said at a soldiers’ reunion seven years after the war ended.

Despite Hood’s defense of slavery, some residents of Bell County, where Fort Hood is located, think the name shouldn’t be changed.

“Renaming Fort Hood, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” said Nancy Boston, 77, the Bell County Republican Party chairwoman. “Some people are still angry at the white man for slavery. That’s just how the world was back then.”