Six teenage boys from a Northern Virginia high school apparently used pieces of landscaping sod to form a swastika and spell out “KKK” and “white power” in a parking lot at a nearby elementary school. Quite understandably, their high school has come down hard on them, suspending some, expelling others, and imposing community service.
The name of the boys’ high school that punished these racist acts? Stonewall Jackson.
:smack:
Yeah, where do these kids get the idea this kind of thing is acceptable? It’s just a shame. If they’d gone to neighboring Lee Atwater High, they would have known to express their prejudices civilly, by using sod to spell out things like “school busing” and “reparations” and “birth certificate.”
Seems like these kids need more schooling, not less.
I don’t get the irony. Is the irony supposed to be that they would do such acts at a school named for a Confederate general? Or is it that a school named for such a general would punish racism instead of rewarding it?
Those kids knew darn well it was wrong, it’s called “shock value.” They may not even believe in anything they did. Kids will do that. They know exactly what will hack the most people off and then they do it.
Now I’m not saying this is the case in this particular incident, but too often teens will do anything to shock parents and race and hate are about all that’s left to shock, especially if you’re male. I mean a girl can put on short skirts and dress in appropriately but what’s left for a male to use as shock value
Thomas Jonathan Jackson was a great general. He is known as Stonewall because of his stand at the Battle of First Manassas/First Bull Run. This high school is in… Manassas, Virginia, built in walking distance to that battlefield. No idea when it was named, but it’s probably been of that name “for a while” and had good reason to be so named.
Was Jackson a slaveowning racist and white supremacist? The answer is a big ‘you betcha’, absolutely. Add to this the irony for a school- that as a teacher and professor he was absolutely despised, and he also suffered from (or caused others to suffer from) severe OCD and very annoying eccentricities*. Was he more or less racist than Abraham “deport them to Africa or Central America- never mind their ancestors have lived here for 200 years” Lincoln, or Lincoln’s appointed general George “I can’t learn to like the odor of either Billy goats or niggers” McLellan? Arguable. Did Jackson ever advocate the mass murder of non-whites? Absolutely not. Was he a member of the KKK? Nope- he was long dead by its founding.
So I don’t see the outcry on the swastika and KKK as any dichotomy.
*Among other things he shared his house with an abolitionist sister and her children with whom he communicated only in writing, he did not sit down except in saddles, he power walked long before that was popular, bathed each morning in ice water [an extravagance] and ate lemons [that nobody was quite sure how he got] constantly.
Put on a short skirt and dress inappropriately.
Markxxx, I generally agree that there was a big shock value aspect. Note, for instance, that at least one of the accused students is black.
Sampiro, the lemons thing is a myth. It was fresh fruit in general that Stonewall liked.
Sorry I can’t provide a cite, as I don’t currently have my Civil War books handy.
Awww… that lemons story was one of my favorite parts of SW Jackson’s mythology…
Great lil’ part of Gods and Generals fictional stories.
Thanks for the info; I honestly didn’t realize that wasn’t true.
From aFAQ on the website of VMI (the institution where Jackson taught and walking distances from the Jackson house museum*) his fruit of choice was peaches.
*Worth seeing if you’re in Lexington but not in and of itself; it’s just a Federal style house whose only significance is that it was Stonewall Jackson’s.
A totally irrelevant story: My father was fascinated by Jackson for some reason and in fact I was named for him in part. (My given name is Jonathan, which was Jackson’s middle name, though he went by Thomas). I did genealogy research a few years ago and learned that my father’s great-grandfather fought under Jackson so perhaps that’s why he was so interested in him, though the same research shows he served under him for only 10 days before being hospitalized and discharged for measles and then reassigned. The same man had a son whose gravestone reads “Thomas J.J., son of John W.”, but is undated and I’ve wondered if this stood for Thomas Jonathan Jackson; the child died in infancy and the grave is undated and there’s no other record of his existence so I’m not sure even when he was born.
Anyway, the story itself is this: during one of our Bicentennial era vacations we wound up in Lexington and my father, a very persuasive guy who would start a conversation with a log if there was nobody else to talk to- to this day I’m not sure if the persuasiveness was based on his skill as an orator or people willing to do anything to make him shut up and go away- somehow and someway convinced the curator (or someone like him) of the museum to let me have a seat on Little Sorrel. I was about 9 or so and thin-nish, and the museum was about to close, so nobody else was around. I don’t know how my father managed this- I can guarantee you no money changed hands as he was usually low on cash and always stingy- but I do know that nobody but family could be around and no picture could be taken. (The curator or curator like person feared that if a picture was made others would see it and want to take a similar one and best case scenario would involve constant pestering and worst would be losing his job.
I do remember it quite well though. My father and the curator put me on the horse. My father had actually wanted my brother to get up there, but as he was about 15 or 16 and even though he was thin was very lanky the curator wouldn’t allow it; being the size and weight of a 9 year old I was the most he would risk.
Anyway, it’s one of my favorite memories of childhood. Only lasted a few seconds, and I have no doubts that I’m not the last kid or person to have sat in that [bloodstained] saddle, but I felt like “king of the world” for a moment. Then I realized I was on a dead horse and asked to be let down. It was the last time I sat on a dead horse (though I have sat on one that’s being electrocuted since- the dead one was actually way more pleasant.)
The next morning we went to Washington and Lee University where my father convinced a very old lady he somehow knew and who worked in the chapel to play the Washington and Lee fight song even though she told him she’d stopped playing piano. For those who don’t know Lee is buried in anextremely plain vault in a family mausoleum that includes his wife, daughters, and other immediate family in the basement of the Washington & Lee Univ. chapel; it’s apparently no longer open to the public but was in the 1970s. As we went down to the Lee family crypt and my sister asked my mother “How much you wanna bet Daddy can talk 'em into sliding him out?”* My father’s response was “if they’d slide Marse Robert out for just five minutes I’d give them their pick of the kids, and throw in Jon.” (It was foregone that their pick would be my brother or sister- he never liked me much- but he did get me on a dead horse belonging to a deader Confederate icon.)
*Googling Robert E. Lee’s grave invariably brings up this picture, which apparently people think is his sarcophagus. Not only is it not his grave it’s not even a statue of him dead; he’s sleeping on an army cot. The mausoleum is in the basement below.
The real irony is that one of the kids busted for this is black.
**The “will throw in Jon” comment didn’t really bother me that much but it brooked umbrage from my mother, whose favorite I was and who never particularly tried to diplomatically hide it This was also the day that we learned profanity reverberates spectacularly in the Lee family mausoleum. For years the family called it “The Battle of the Vaults”. True story. Even so I thought it was cool because while I was used to my parents fighting I wasn’t used to graves behind iron grates and so I got to pretend I was in the Sound of Music, albeit one in which the Nazis would have heard us from Berchtesgaden (though they wouldn’t have tried any crap with my mother).
