A federal judge already decided the Shenandoah County School Board violated the First Amendment when they reinstated Confederate names on public schools. The court is still considering whether they broke other laws in the process. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi spoke with the school board's lead attorney about the case and filed this report.
Oral arguments were held on Tuesday in the NAACP and students' lawsuit against the school board for reinstating the names Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School in 2024, after they'd been removed in 2020. Now, U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski is deciding whether the school board violated the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act.
For the first time in the nearly two years my colleague Bridget Manley and I have been reporting on this court case, WMRA got to interview someone with the defense.
JIM GUYNN: My understanding is that my client will take it as far as necessary, including seeking a writ at the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jim Guynn is the managing partner and founder of the Guynn Waddell law firm in Salem. In the 'small world' of the commonwealth, Guynn studied history at Washington and Lee University just before Brigadier General Ty Seidule – who testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs about the Civil War and Jim Crow era. Guynn also attended UVa Law School alongside Judge Urbanski. Guynn said regardless of how Urbanski rules on the claims that went to trial in December, this case is far from over.
GUYNN: Well, we're going to appeal either way because of his ruling on the First Amendment. … Regardless of what he does with the issue that was argued yesterday, he has still basically ruled that the name of the school, Stonewall Jackson anyway, must be changed. … It seems to me that it's rather groundshaking, because if he's correct, then every school in the United States that's named after a Confederate general or someone else who makes people feel uncomfortable could be subject to court order to change the name.
The Shenandoah County case is unique across the country because the school board removed and then reinstated Confederate names – but Guynn believes this case could open the door for incoming students to challenge a school's longstanding name.
GUYNN: This sort of case arose up in Hanover County several years ago … and the court there ruled that the statute of limitations precluded litigating the case. So the plaintiffs brought this case because the names changed back, which happened within the two year statute of limitations that applies to cases alleging constitutional harm.
One hotly contested issue that came up repeatedly at trial was the defendants' use of legislative privilege, the legal doctrine that protects legislators from being forced to testify about their motivations for votes.
According to the federal web resource "Constitution Annotated," this privilege traces its roots back to 1600s England, when the Crown repeatedly prosecuted and intimidated members of Parliament who spoke out against the monarchy. The English Bill of Rights of 1689 sought to end that abuse, and the United States adopted their language for doing so in our own Constitution.
School board members invoked this privilege at times while being deposed by the NAACP's lawyers so they wouldn't have to explain why they voted to reinstate the Confederate names. But they still wanted to introduce evidence for what could have been their reasoning – such as the results of a controversial survey administered to local households by advocates for the Confederate names. Urbanski ruled that "the school board may not seek to shield discovery of the reasons for their decision to change the school names and then offer evidence or argument about these reasons as a sword."
Guynn disagrees with that interpretation.
GUYNN: What's happened in other cases is … the defendants, who are always the ones taking the privilege, then put on evidence of all of the different things that were going on at the time … and the court considers those and whether or not they would be a reasonable basis or a reasonable defense to the claim.
Legal scholars at Boston College and Stanford Law School have recently published articles about how legislative privilege can butt heads with anti-discrimination law, such as the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause, because it limits a plaintiff's ability to probe whether a legislator had discriminatory purposes.
HAGI: If someone doesn't have discriminatory intent – you know, if their reasons are in good faith and sound, why not answer those questions?
GUYNN: Well, the interesting thing is, for the most part, we did. … But I think your question is probably well answered as to why defendants in criminal cases don't testify. … They don't have to, so therefore, they shouldn't. …
He brought up the plaintiffs' allegations that the 2024 school board opposed diversity and inclusion, writ large, because those values motivated the 2020 board to retire the names.
GUYNN: … you know, you don't want to get into parsing every little word that goes on, and that's why the legislative privilege is important, and it should lead, in most cases, to summary judgement.
HAGI: Because any statement could potentially be misconstrued?
GUYNN: Right.
He said one of the reasons he took this case in the first place was because he was offended at the "application of 21st century standards to 19th century figures."
GUYNN: You know, we now look at this stuff and we say, okay, because the Confederate generals were slaveholders, then nothing they did in life was worthwhile. I don't think history works that way. There are plenty of people in life who have absolutely no redeeming qualities. … Hitler, Pol Pot. … But you've got guys who were products of their time, and … can we blame them for not having the overall moral view or whatever that they shouldn't own slaves? … Now, does that make the fact of slaveholding less onerous? No. But could we just have a little bit of understanding of people in their own times?
He brought up the fact that James Madison University is named after an enslaver. This was also raised at trial because one of the former student plaintiffs is now in college there, but hadn't campaigned against this name as he had against Stonewall Jackson.
GUYNN: But they both were slaveowners, and one of them fought to preserve that. Well, read enough history, and you'll realize that Madison realized he had to compromise to get the Constitution done, with regard to slaveholding. And all of this is very ugly from our perspective in the 21st century, and I think that what we're overlooking is that … folks in the 19th and 18th centuries had a very different view.
HAGI: I mean, some of them. To be fair, there were the people who were enslaved and there were abolitionists in certain parts of the country. It's not like there was one monolith of opinion in America at the time.
GUYNN: No, there wasn't. I agree with you. … There were abolitionists in the north, but there weren't enough of them to say, "no, sorry, we're not going to do it this way to have a constitution."
At the end of the day, Guynn thinks the Shenandoah County residents who favored the Confederate names – who elected the 2024 school board members who campaigned on the issue – would have had the same attachment regardless of what the names had been.
GUYNN: When they hear the name Stonewall Jackson, they think of their school. … They think of the building, they think of their school uniforms, they think of when they were there and they scored a touchdown or they hit the winning free throw, or they were the homecoming queen or they were the valedictorian. That thought process doesn't include pondering these great questions. … "Changing the name of it deprives us because I have a diploma from Stonewall Jackson High School which no longer exists." And I think that's important to them.
How the federal court for the Western District of Virginia views it – or, for that matter, how the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals will – remains to be seen.
