Other views: Confederate leaders were fine commanders

Bryan Mark Rigg, military historian and former Marine:

“Many Confederate leaders were excellent commanders and have been studied by the nation’s greatest leaders and institutions. The most famous, like Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and James Longstreet, served the Union and graduated from West Point before they became traitors ( aka Rebels). Renaming Confederate named- bases ( Fort Hood, Fort Bragg, etc.) — ‘ christened’ after brave and accomplished military commanders who, after the Civil War, were accepted back into the Union as Americans — seems to beg many questions. Who should we honor from our past?”

Paul Brandus, USA TODAY:

“The Army is the service branch with the greatest percentage of Black troops. These young men and women who sign up to go into harm’s way for us are stationed at bases named for men who, in another time, would have gladly enslaved them and their families. Is this really the best we can do, and the best example we can set?”

Lily Burana, NBC News:

“As a white American of Confederate heritage — and a proud Army veteran’s wife — when it comes to the movement to rename military bases that bear the names of Confederate soldiers, I say: Make it happen. ... The renaming of military installations will make history. Let history unfold — expeditiously and definitively.”

The Baltimore Sun, editorial:

“One imagines President Donald Trump could not pick Braxton Bragg out of a photo lineup. What he can do, however, is recognize that the white Southern vote is crucial to his reelection chances. ... So Trump sticks up for Fort Gordon, named after John Brown Gordon, who is widely believed to have served as head of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia after the Civil War. This is yet another instance of this president not only failing to recognize systemic racism that continues to plague this nation’s most important institutions, including the military, but seeking to inflame a culture war.”

David Petraeus, The Atlantic:

“For an organization designed to win wars to train for them at installations named for those who led a losing force is sufficiently peculiar, but when we consider the cause for which these officers fought, we begin to penetrate the confusion of Civil War memory. These bases are, after all, federal installations, home to soldiers who swear an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States.”