Flags' removal met with praise, protest
Washington and Lee, while acknowledging a painful past, hasn't deserted the general.
LEXINGTON, Va. - Washington and Lee University is drawing praise from some and complaints from others after announcing that it will remove Confederate battle flags from a chapel on the Virginia campus where Robert E. Lee is buried.
The Virginia school where the top Confederate general had served as president after the Civil War disclosed plans Tuesday to move the flags. It also said it would continue to study the university's historical involvement with slavery.
About a dozen black law school students wrote to the university trustees in April demanding that the flags be banished. Those students reached Wednesday said they welcomed the move. But critics said those flags had a rightful place in history and some said they were withdrawing plans to donate Civil War books and Lee memorabilia to the university.
The students had said in their letter that they felt "alienation and discomfort" with what they saw as the trappings of the Confederacy.
In their April letter, the students also had demanded that the school repudiate Lee. And they had called on the private liberal arts college to end the practice of allowing "neo-Confederates" to march on campus with battle flags during Lee-Jackson Day, a Virginia state holiday that falls on the Friday before Martin Luther King Day.
While it didn't repudiate Lee, university president Kenneth Ruscio said, the school of about 2,200 students acknowledges that slavery was a "regrettable chapter of our history, and we must confront and try to understand this chapter."
Ultimately the school said it would remove the array of eight Confederate battle flags in Lee Chapel, where the Lee family is buried, and instead display original flags from a Civil War museum on a rotating basis.