Last spring in Tyler, Texas, a small city two hours east of Dallas, an African-American couple had a series of agonizing conversations at their kitchen table at night, talking softly after their children were in bed. Their daughter, and oldest child, loved cheerleading in junior high; she was eager to try out for the squad at the local public high school, where she was set to enroll as a freshman in the fall. But the name of this particular school in Tyler, a community that some residents like to think of as the western edge of the Old South, ate away at her parents. “We would ask ourselves, Are we really gonna have our daughter running around a football field yelling, ‘I love Robert E. Lee’?” the mother told me.
Portrait of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in uniform
The school board in Tyler, a small town in East Texas, recently met to debate whether to rename the school, which is now almost sixty per cent black and Latino.Photograph by Bettmann / Getty

In the end, the couple decided to send their daughter to Robert E. Lee High School, where the student body is nearly sixty per cent black and Latino. They considered a local private school, but it was expensive and farther away, and many of their daughter’s friends were going to Lee. “This should be an exciting and happy time for a family,” the mother, who asked to remain anonymous because she feared retaliation against her daughter, said. “No one should have to go to a school named for their oppressor.”

On a humid Monday evening last month, she was one of nearly three hundred parents and residents who showed up for a school-board meeting to join—or rejoin—a half-century-old fight in Tyler: What to do with Robert E. Lee High School? Those who support changing the name contend that the time is right, given the school’s current demographics and the fact that it is being torn down and completely rebuilt in a hundred-and-twenty-two-million-dollar renovation. Opponents say changing the name would erase history.

As the meeting began, three uniformed police officers greeted attendees at the door, seeming to know about every third person who walked in; some who attended carried handwritten speeches. The white supremacists in Charlottesville—and what President Trump did and didn’t say about them—got Tylerites talking about their own city’s most radioactive Confederate symbol. But of the roughly forty people who signed up and spoke for two minutes apiece at the meeting, not one uttered the word “Trump,” whether they were for or against changing the school’s name. A few rattled off talking points lifted wholesale from Facebook, about creeping neoliberalism and “the Marxist agenda” and isis destroying statues, but those remarks didn’t stir many in the crowd.

Instead, jaws tightened when someone brought up how Robert E. Lee High School got its name in the first place. It opened as an all-white school, in 1958, four years after Brown v. Board of Education and just a few months after the state of Texas won a major victory against the N.A.A.C.P. in state court. More than one speaker cast the then-all-white school board’s choice of name as clear-cut retribution, a reminder of black folks’ place in Tyler. Later, a white father of three said that his children, who graduated from Robert E. Lee twenty years ago, “might as well use their diplomas as toilet paper” if the school’s name was taken away.

Before the meeting started, Kevin Braly, Robert E. Lee Class of 1977, sat toward the back of the room chatting with his sister and cousin, who both went to Lee, too. Braly is a beefy guy, white, with a shaved head under a baseball cap and a thick white beard. He’s a proud alumnus, but he also remembers parts of his time at Lee as “awful, just awful.” He went to school there during an earlier iteration of the school’s debate over heritage and hate. In 1970, a statewide federal desegregation order, issued by a district judge in Tyler, forced Lee to admit black students. The school also had to get rid of its Confederate-themed mascot (the Rebels), fight song (“Dixie”), and prized Confederate flag (so large that it required twenty boys to carry). Its beloved Rebel Guard, a squadron of boys handpicked by an American-history teacher to dress in replica Confederate uniforms at football games and fire a cannon named Ole Spirit after touchdowns, had to find a new name. Same for the Rebelettes drill team.

Immediately after his desegregation order, the judge and his wife became widely hated in town—she had to drive to the next county over to get her hair done. When Braly started at Lee as a freshman, five years later, he remembers, fights were still breaking out between black and white students. “And that was just over a mascot,” he said. “Imagine the fighting if they change the whole name.”

FEATURED VIDEO

The Underground University That Won’t Be Stopped

Also attending the meeting was Karen Jeffery-Sanders, a fifth-generation black Tylerite in her early fifties. Her parents and grandparents were alumni of another storied Tyler high school: Emmett J. Scott, once the city’s powerhouse all-black school, named for a black educator and Renaissance man. Jeffery-Sanders grew up being sure that she’d go to Scott someday; it seemed that every grownup she looked up to was a Scottie. The school had pumped out generations of Tyler’s black lawyers, doctors, and civic leaders. Its teachers—including Jeffery-Sanders’s parents—came from the best historically black colleges in the country. But, by the time she finished middle school, Scott was an asbestos-ridden empty shell. It was forced to close in 1970, a casualty of the same integration battle that took away Robert E. Lee’s Rebel flag. In a move that the black community in Tyler interpreted as payback, the nearly all-white school board chose to shut Scott down rather than integrate it. Jeffery-Sanders went to one of Tyler’s formerly all-white high schools instead.

At the school-board meeting, several attendees kept track of how many speakers were for and against the name change. In the end, it was a draw: eighteen for, eighteen against. Jeffery-Sanders winced as some of the “against” white Tyler residents took their turns at the microphone, arguing emotionally about what they saw as erasing the past. “I wanted to say to them, ‘Where were you when they erased Emmett J. Scott? Where were you when they erased my history?’ ” she told me.

For Tylerites with old connections to both high schools, the new fight over the school’s name “feels like picking an old scab that never healed,” the Reverend Michael Mast, a black minister in town, told me. Mast was the final speaker of the night. The superintendent’s request for total silence during each person’s comments had largely been followed by the crowd, but Mast sparked a response. He brought up the fact that black folks in Tyler were never invited to comment on the decision to not only get rid of the name Emmett J. Scott High School but to get rid of the whole school. The meeting room became church for a moment, as many of the black folks present nodded and shifted in their seats, and a murmur of agreement and appreciation rippled through the crowd.

This time around, nearly everyone in the room stayed until the end. Of the citizens who spoke in favor of a new name, most were white. This school board today is more diverse. Of the seven-member board, two members are black and one is Hispanic. One of the black board members graduated with honors from the last-ever class at Emmett J. Scott High School, the Class of 1970. The grandmother of one of the white board members had given the giant Confederate flag that once flew over Robert E. Lee High School’s football games. A second board meeting on this issue was held this week, and a slim majority of members seemed to favor renaming the school. The board president, a white Lee grad and a pastor in town, noted that Tyler has a long record, “at seemingly every turn,” of resisting efforts to integrate its schools. “To those who say we should not forget our history,” he said, “I would say the history of fifty years ago is more important than the history of one hundred and fifty years ago.”

Hardly any current students showed up at either meeting, but they have been debating the issue on Instagram and Snapchat. Several pointed out to me that their entire school is being torn down soon, as part of the renovation approved by Tyler voters this year. “No one seems to be upset about that,” Brandon Collins, sixteen, a black Lee junior, told me. “You say we can’t change the name ’cause that would be erasing history, but you’re happy that we’re getting a whole new building?” Ideas for a new name are being tossed around among the student body. There’s Rose City High (Tyler is big on roses), Hamilton High, and Tyler Lee, the school’s unofficial nickname, long popular with black families who want to avoid the real name.

Mast, the black minister who elicited “amens” at the August school-board meeting, says that the name has to change, and argues that there are only two good options. As a “great compromise,” the board could rename the school as a tribute to Dorothy Lee, a black Tyler community organizer who played a big role in the push, half a century ago, to clean out Confederate flags and symbols from Robert E. Lee High. “She was a great, great lady,” the reverend told me. “You couldn’t go wrong with that.” The reverend’s No. 1 choice? Emmett J. Scott High School. “That would be poetic justice,” he said with a laugh, as his wife, Sandra, who was a sophomore at Scott when it closed, listened. How would white Tyler respond to that choice? Mast thought about it for a second. “To be quite honest,” he said, “they would get over it and move on, just like we had to move on. Once it was decided, it was decided. What more could you say?”