For a Northerner like me, coming to live in Washington, D.C. has been eye-opening in many ways. One of these has been living right across the river from Virginia, which up until very recently had a staggering number of public Confederate artifacts.

Even in Blue Northern Virginia, you couldn’t turn a corner without running into a building or a road named after Robert E. Lee.

Then, in the last couple of years, many were renamed. On some building facades, you can still see the shadows of old letters, where “Lee” has been torn down to make way for new names that won’t be a gut punch to every person of color walking by.

It was genuinely encouraging to see so much change happen in a short time, after decades of resistance. Public Confederate monuments don't just remind Black Americans of a painful history, they send a message that the powers that be don't notice or care about that impact. And most were created decades after the Civil War — more to push back against Black Americans' progress than to commemorate any war "hero."

So when a Virginia school district voted this month to restore the names of Lee and other Confederates to two schools, it hurt.

That it happened just days before the 70th anniversary........

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