"Thus Only Can We Preserve Constitutional Government": The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s School-Naming Projects of the Midcentury

In the midst of the Civil Rights Movement, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) named public K-12 schools across the nation after Confederate leaders. In a speech initially given by Senator John Stennis, reprinted in the UDC Magazine’s June 1956 issue, Jefferson Davis is referenced as a champion of states’ rights after which contemporary Americans should model their own behavior as a way to fight against a “force construction of the Constitution.” Three years later, the UDC convinced the school boards in San Diego, California and Jacksonville, Florida to name an elementary school after Robert E. Lee, and a high school after Nathan Bedford Forrest, respectively. The UDC’s school-naming projects of the mid-20th century exploited the utility of public Civil War memory to explicitly resist desegregation efforts within and beyond the South, using the language of states’ rights and often making definitive connections to race and the history of slavery.

By drawing on visual and documentary evidence, this interdisciplinary paper will argue that the naming of these schools not only reasserted a racialized social hierarchy in the face of Civil Rights and desegregation, but also marked a significant shift in the language and tone of the Lost Cause. Although scholars such as Jon Wiener and Robert Cook have written about the relationship between Civil War memory and the Civil Rights Movement, the critical role played by the naming of public schools has not yet received adequate attention. Additionally, scholars have yet to consider the efforts of the United Daughters of the Confederacy as a particular moment in the lifespan of the Lost Cause mythology, marked by an acute focus on race and states’ rights. By considering the use of objects and naming practices as pedagogy, this paper will interpret ideas concerning race, gender, and belonging encoded within these projects.