It is time to rename this Baytown school
Four years ago, Houston Independent School District voted to rename Robert E. Lee High School and other schools named after Confederate loyalists. Now, following George Floyd’s tragic death and as part of a long-overdue conversation about systemic racism, communities around the country are reexamining the names of their own institutions.
Unfortunately, another Houston-area school — Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown — remains anchored in the past.
Situated among the oil fields that gave birth to the Baytown community, Lee High School is a portal to another time. The school was built in 1928 to accommodate the population boom that followed the discovery of oil in the area. Over the past century, the high school has become an emblem of civic pride. It is woven into Baytown’s identity.
I am a third-generation white graduate of the high school who grew up revering its traditions. The marching band — which supported the school’s celebrated football team with tunes like “Dixie” — was once believed to be the largest in Texas. The Lee Brigadiers — an all-female drum-and-bugle group formed in 1934, and which performed in Confederate-style military uniforms — was featured in Life Magazine in 1956.
In 2011, a local group successfully petitioned to make Lee High School a Texas historical landmark. An accompanying marker notes that the school was named for Lee because of “the Confederate general’s popularity in the area” when the school was founded.
But Lee’s name has long been an uncomfortable fit. By the time I graduated in 1991, the school was serving a student population bearing little resemblance to the predominantly white demographic of decades past. During my senior year, an African American friend and classmate received the ironic distinction of being crowned “General Robert E. Lee,” our school’s equivalent of the prom king.
Today, Lee serves a student population that is 73 percent Hispanic and 15 percent African American. Its demographic has tracked that of the surrounding community, where two-thirds of residents are people of color. Although many students and parents justifiably take pride, as I do, in the school’s legacy, it is unlikely that their pride stems from Lee’s “popularity in the area.”
As a former federal prosecutor, I have been deeply troubled by the police practices that have rightly drawn scrutiny over these last weeks. We need police reform — and we need it urgently. But if recent events have taught us anything, it is that scrutiny of our institutions must extend to every corner of society, down to the names of our schools.
Pride in a place can be hard to divorce from the name attached to that place. Yet, to address the forces that contributed to the deaths of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and so many others, we must learn to separate our affection for the people and customs that lift us all up from the harmful, sometimes quiet, symbols that work to keep some of us down.
A lesson can be drawn from the call to remove names of Confederate soldiers from military installations. As Gen. David Patreaus put it recently, the shroud of tradition can make everything about such institutions seem “rock solid, time tested, immortal,” but “[o]nce the names of these bases are stripped of the obscuring power of tradition and folklore, renaming the installations becomes an easy, even obvious, decision.”
So too with Baytown Lee. We should not ignore history. However, we also should not venerate a man who betrayed his country in defense of the institution of slavery by making our public schools shrines to his legacy. (A sad irony is that Lee, who opposed Confederate monuments, likely would have agreed.)
Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu made the case eloquently three years ago following the city’s decision to remove four Confederate monuments. He asked constituents to consider a monument honoring Lee from the perspective of an African American child. “Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?” Landrieu asked. “Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential?”
Baytown’s school board members should ask these same questions when considering the name of the community’s flagship high school.