The trial over the Shenandoah County School Board's decision to restore Confederate names to two schools resumed on Monday with a full day of testimony. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Counsel for the plaintiffs in this case – the Virginia State Conference NAACP and five students – called three witnesses to the stand on Monday. The first, plaintiff A.D. Carter V, is a current JMU student who graduated from the Massanutten Regional Governor's School earlier this year. The Governor's School is housed at Stonewall Jackson High School, and Carter testified about the impact the reinstatement of the Confederate name had on him, saying "it just weighed on me … almost like an invisible ball and chain."
During cross-examination, one of the defendants' attorneys, John Fitzgerald, suggested that while James Madison enslaved people, Carter hasn't pushed to change that school's name because "you're having too much fun."
The next person to take the stand was expert witness Dr. Adiaha Spinks-Franklin. She's a developmental-behavioral pediatrician who explained the medical research on how racism negatively impacts the physiological and psychological health of Black children and adults in the U.S. by creating a chronic presence of stress hormones. She said "Confederate iconography is a form of cultural racism" that serves as "a signal to Black people of their lower social status," and that Confederate symbols on schools create a "cognitive load for the Black students."
Defendants' attorney Christopher Dadak spent much of the doctor's cross-examination pointing out that she did not have a doctor-patient relationship with the plaintiffs, and had not diagnosed them with specific conditions resulting from racial trauma.
After lunch, the Rev. Cozy Bailey, the president of the state conference of the NAACP testified about his organization's structure and why they filed this lawsuit. He noted that the national organization has challenged the display of Confederate symbols since the release of "The Birth of a Nation" in 1915, the film adaptation of "The Clansman: A Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan." Bailey recounted listening sessions the NAACP conducted with Shenandoah County students and parents last year, in which they heard that the Confederate name reinstatement was "hurtful, harmful," and "a monument … to the oppressors of their ancestors." The state conference emailed a letter to the school board just prior to the 2024 vote urging them not to take that step, and never got a response.
The final piece of evidence presented on Monday was a video of the deposition of former School Board Member Brandi Rutz, who campaigned on reinstating the Confederate names as long as it was done with private donations. She said that "the Confederacy was formed in part because of a governmental overreach," and that slavery was part of it, but she didn't believe it was "a focal point." Rutz said she has an emotional attachment to the name Stonewall Jackson because her children graduated from there, and that the process by which the 2020 school board removed the Confederate names happened too quickly, in a virtual meeting, without enough public input. "It's not the school board's job to fight" for racial justice and civil rights, she said, but to "educate all races fairly."
The trial continues Tuesday morning with the plaintiffs' last witness.
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