Lee High School and chose a mascot that perfectly captured the community’s prevailing “here’s-where-you-can-shove-it” attitude toward outside authority: the Rebels. Should the district’s intentions be unclear, the school board named the campus Robert E. Thanks to redlining and the economic segregation of neighborhoods, the new school was almost certain to be entirely white. In 1961, the district opened a new high school on the northwest side of town, just about as far away as one could get from the city’s predominantly minority neighborhoods. Board of Education decision instructed the nation to desegregate “with all deliberate speed,” nothing much changed in Midland. In 1954, after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. The uncomfortable truth is that Midland’s reckoning with its past and present is far from over, even after the new Legacy High School sign goes up. Indeed, one risk after the name change is that it might enable some in Midland to mistakenly think the city has crossed the finish line when it comes to racial justice and educational equity. (A $569 million dollar bond failed by 26 votes, out of 23,626 cast, in a debacle involving a misplaced voting box last January.) Not all the dissenters make their case purely in protest of what they consider “revisionist history.” Some question the prudence of spending millions of dollars to rebrand a school (for facilities, fine arts, and athletics, according to the preliminary report) at a time when the city’s economy has been gutted by slumping oil prices, nearly half of the district’s forty schools are deemed as failing by the Texas Education Agency, and school buildings are so aged that at one elementary campus the drinking water ran brown and contained high levels of arsenic. Many opponents also say they’ll now refuse to support a much-needed bond package to upgrade educational facilities and address overcrowding in the district’s campuses. Some factions in Midland remain angry about the decision, vowing to vote out MISD board members in next week’s election, threatening a lawsuit, and even starting a petition to recall trustees they deem to have defied their constituents. The mascot will still be a Rebel too, only reimagined as an American Revolutionary War hero instead of a secessionist defender of slavery. Its school colors, maroon and white, will remain. Then, earlier this month, it was officially rechristened Legacy High School (though the change won’t take effect until fall 2021). Though there were counterpetitions and counterprotests that sought to prevent the change, the Midland ISD board in July responded to a petition signed by 10,363 residents and voted, 6–1, to rename Lee. Midland’s Lee High School and its freshman campus are among those to shed traditions that have caused pain to generations of Black students and parents, like the Normans. A mere four months later, five fewer schools in Texas bear Confederate namesakes. But as the effects of the protests in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death reverberated nationwide, some public officials were moved to action. “No one ever asked me that before,” he said.Īs recently as June, Texas had 45 schools named for Confederate figures, easily beating out runner-up states Georgia (23) and Virginia (24) in that dubious distinction. How did it feel to him, as a Black man, when Midland Lee scored and the band struck up a rousing chorus of “Dixie” while Confederate flags were waved with wild delight by spectators around him? Jerry’s eyes welled up at the memory. Nor could she have imagined that, nearly three decades later, she’d ask her father-in-law, Jerry Norman, about sitting in the stadium during the team’s games. Sprawled on the living room floor, she didn’t know she’d someday marry one of the Rebels’ then-stars, John Norman. It was 1997, and she was in junior high school. Lee Rebels football team on TV, as it played Odessa’s Permian Panthers, under the bright white Friday night lights of West Texas. “It’s a shame they make those boys play under Lee,” young Denise Gray heard her father muttering as he sat in his favorite living room chair, watching the Midland Robert E.
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