Forty-eight Confederate symbols were removed, renamed or relocated in 2022 including two in Alabama, newly released Southern Poverty Law Center data shows.

The two in Alabama occurred at one time. The Montgomery County School Board, following a 5-2 vote during a meeting in November, renamed two schools after civil rights activists and leaders, removing the names Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee from their institutions.

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“All students should be able to hold a sense of pride in their school and not be forced to attend institutions named in honor of men who fought to keep Black children enslave and uneducated,” said Tafeni English-Relf, director of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Alabama State Office.

Jefferson Davis High School – long named after the first and only president of the Confederate states — was renamed Dr. Percy Julian High School, who was a Montgomery native, and grandson of slaves credited with synthesizing medications to treat glaucoma and rheumatoid arthritis.

Robert Lee High School – named after the Confederate general during the Civil War – was renamed JAG High School after the first initial of three civil rights activists: Judge Frank Johnson, Ralph Abernathy, and Robert Graetz.

• Johnson was a federal judge in Montgomery from 1955-1979, who sided with Rosa Parks during the bus boycotts and struck down the city’s segregation policy.
• Abernathy was the pastor of an all-Black church and a good friend of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. who was arrested alongside King during the civil rights demonstrations.
• Graetz, a native of West Virginia, was a young minister when he arrived to Montgomery in 1955, to serve as pastor of the all-Black Trinity Lutheran Church. He encouraged congregants to participate in the Montgomery bus boycott, and provided them transportation. Graetz, the only white minister to support the Montgomery bus boycott, died in 2020, at age 92.

“The namesakes for J.A.G and Dr. Percy Julian High Schools are civil rights pioneers that the entire community – as well as the nation – can be proud of,” said English-Relf.

Fort Novosel

The SPLC is also tracking other Confederate symbols pending for renaming or removal. A renaming of Sidney Lanier High School in Montgomery is likely no longer under consideration since the school is slated for closure, and students will be merged into Carver High School. Sidney Lanier High School is named after a Confederate Army solider and a poet who was once hailed as the “poet of the Confederacy.”

The SPLC, in next year’s listing, will be able to add the renaming of Fort Rucker. The military post was officially renamed during a redesignation ceremony Monday.

The post, which spans 63,000 acres in southeast Alabama, was named Fort Novosel after the late U.S. Army Chief Warrant Officer 4 Michael Novosel Sr., a Medal of Honor recipient. Novosel’s heroism included two tours in Vietnam where he is credited for flying in 2,543 extraction missions and rescuing over 5,500 seriously wounded soldiers.

Novosel died in 2006 at age 83.

Fort Rucker had long been named after the Confederate Gen. Edmund Rucker, who fought under Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and an early Ku Klux Klan leader after the Civil War. Rucker later was an business leader in Birmingham.

The Southeast Alabama military site has been in use by the U.S. Army since 1942. The post is the home of Army aviation.

“His legacy of courage under fire in support of soldiers on the ground is what we train for and expert of our soldiers,” said Maj. Gen. Michael McCurry, U.S. Army Aviation Center of Excellence and commanding general of the military base, in a statement. “It is an honor for the Home of Army Aviation to bear his name.”

Fort Rucker’s renaming was one of nine U.S. Army installations redesignated based on the Naming Commission’s recommendations, and part of a process initiated last year under Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, a Mobile native and the first Black man to serve in that role.

Tuskegee pending

English-Relf said that the SPLC is also awaiting on a resolution involving a Confederate monument in downtown Tuskegee near the Macon County Courthouse.

The monument’s fate is tangled up in ongoing litigation over a 117-year-old deed that gave the monument’s land to the Tuskegee Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy for the purpose of maintaining a “park for white people” and “maintaining a monument” to Confederate soldiers.

A Macon County judge ruled in January that there is no evidence the space has been maintained as a segregated park, and that the 1906 deed should revert back to the Macon County Commission since it was not being used as a “park for white people.”

An attorney for the Confederate heritage group said in February that he was planning to appeal the ruling to the Alabama Supreme Court, arguing that he did not believe the deed was enforceable.

Macon County Commission Chairman Louis Maxwell said there was no update to the case, and that they were awaiting to see what the all-white state supreme court planned to do. He said he was hopeful there would be a negotiation on the matter and has said that the site of the Confederate monument is “public property” for Macon County.

The county is 80% Black, while Tuskegee is 97% Black.

English-Relf, with the SPLC, said she believes the Confederate memorial in Tuskegee will be removed in 2023.

The Montgomery-based SPLC has been tracking the removal of Confederate symbols through it’s “Who’s Heritage?” report, first released in 2018. The report is tracks where Confederate symbols are removed and is an effort that began after nine Black people were killed in 2015 during a Bible study at Mother Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a gunman radicalized by white supremacist websites.

The latest report highlights the locations where Confederate symbols were removed. Virginia, for the third straight year, led the nation in removing 13 Confederate symbols from public spaces. Louisiana and North Carolina tied at seven each for second place, while New York and Texas tied at five a piece, finishing tied for third.

A total of 482 Confederate symbols have been removed, renamed or relocated from public spaces following the Charleston massacre.

Alabama is one of seven states that has a preservation law in place assessing fines to block removal of Confederate symbols. The SPLC reports 18 Confederate symbol removals in Alabama since 2015.

Lawmakers could be considering increased fines for future Confederate symbol removals. A draft bill proposes to raise the fine for moving a monument or changing the name of a memorial street or building from the current $25,000, to a penalty of $10,000 per day for every day that a government entity failed to restore what it moved or changed.