SEEING ‘REB’ IN B’KLYN
Confed honor OK
The Army has turned down a request to rename streets at Brooklyn’s Fort Hamilton that honor two Confederate generals. Rep. Yvette Clarke and three other New York lawmakers had demanded that the Army change the names of Stonewall Jackson Drive and General Lee Avenue.
Both men were stationed at the base in the 1840s.
“These monuments are deeply offensive to the hundreds of thousands of Brooklyn residents and members of the armed forces stationed at Fort Hamilton whose ancestors Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson fought to hold in slavery,” Clarke said Monday in a statement.
“For too many years, the United States has refused to reckon with that history. I commend the city of New Orleans for initiating this important and often difficult work. I will continue to petition the Department of the Army to contribute to that effort,” she said, referring to New Orleans’ removal of monuments honoring Lee and other Confederate figures this year.
But the Army said the two generals are part of military history and deserve to keep their honors.
The streets were named after Lee and Jackson “in the spirit of reconciliation” after the war, the Army said, adding that they were recognized as individuals, not representatives of “any particular cause or ideology.”
“After over a century, any effort to rename memorializations on Fort Hamilton would be controversial and divisive,” acting Assistant Secretary of the Army Diane Randon said in a reply letter.
Clarke didn’t accept that argument and said she would keep pushing for the name change.
“That ‘reconciliation’ was actually complicity by the North and the South to ignore the interests of AfricanAmericans and enforce white supremacy, effectively denying the result of the Civil War for generations,” she said.
“We are still living with the failure of this nation to fully accept that result, as well as the post-Civil War amendments that were ratified to establish the freedom of women and men who had been held in bondage.”
Clarke and Reps. Jerrold Nadler, Nydia Velazquez and Hakeem Jeffries requested the name change in June, weeks after New Orleans took down its statues.