Description
Robert E. Lee High School is a High School in Baytown Texas in the Houston area. The student population is more than 88% minority with more than 70% of the students identifying as Latino. There are many deserving heroes whose names could grace the school, inspire its students, and form a solid foundation for future growth and achievement at the school.
Opinion: It's time to rename Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown
By Shane T. Stansbury June 24, 2020 In The Houston Chronicle.
Stansbury is a former federal prosecutor who teaches at Duke Law School and Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy. He is a graduate of Baytown Lee’s Class of 1991.
"Four years ago, Houston Independent School District voted to rename Robert E. Lee High School and other schools named after Confederate loyalists. Now, following George Floyd’s tragic death and as part of a long-overdue conversation about systemic racism, communities around the country are reexamining the names of their own institutions.
Unfortunately, another Houston-area school — Robert E. Lee High School in Baytown — remains anchored in the past.
Situated among the oil fields that gave birth to the Baytown community, Lee High School is a portal to another time. The school was built in 1928 to accommodate the population boom that followed the discovery of oil in the area. Over the past century, the high school has become an emblem of civic pride. It is woven into Baytown’s identity.
I am a third-generation white graduate of the high school who grew up revering its traditions. The marching band — which supported the school’s celebrated football team with tunes like “Dixie” — was once believed to be the largest in Texas. The Lee Brigadiers — an all-female drum-and-bugle group formed in 1934, and which performed in Confederate-style military uniforms — was featured in Life Magazine in 1956.
In 2011, a local group successfully petitioned to make Lee High School a Texas historical landmark. An accompanying marker notes that the school was named for Lee because of “the Confederate general’s popularity in the area” when the school was founded.
But Lee’s name has long been an uncomfortable fit. By the time I graduated in 1991, the school was serving a student population bearing little resemblance to the predominantly white demographic of decades past. During my senior year, an African American friend and classmate received the ironic distinction of being crowned “General Robert E. Lee,” our school’s equivalent of the prom king.
Today, Lee serves a student population that is 73 percent Hispanic and 15 percent African American. Its demographic has tracked that of the surrounding community, where two-thirds of residents are people of color. Although many students and parents justifiably take pride, as I do, in the school’s legacy, it is unlikely that their pride stems from Lee’s “popularity in the area.”
So too with Baytown Lee. We should not ignore history. However, we also should not venerate a man who betrayed his country in defense of the institution of slavery by making our public schools shrines to his legacy. (A sad irony is that Lee, who opposed Confederate monuments, likely would have agreed.)
Former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu made the case eloquently three years ago following the city’s decision to remove four Confederate monuments. He asked constituents to consider a monument honoring Lee from the perspective of an African American child. “Can you look into that young girl’s eyes and convince her that Robert E. Lee is there to encourage her?” Landrieu asked. “Do these monuments help her see a future with limitless potential?”
Baytown’s school board members should ask these same questions when considering the name of the community’s flagship high school."