Stonewalled

IT WAS A COLD MORNING LAST DECEMBER when they finally took Stonewall Jackson down. No ceremony was held, no protesters gathered; snowflakes swirled in the air. A crane silently hoisted the enormous bronze Confederate general from his perch of 108 years.

To many graduates of the Virginia Military Institute, that was no way to treat a hero. In a Facebook group for the “VMI Spirit,” alumni mourned the “erasing” of their cherished history. One called it “ethnic cleansing.” Several vowed to write the school out of their wills. “Shame on you low-life PsOS that were involved in this decision,” another man wrote. “May you be haunted nightly, by the Sons and Daughters of Virginia that fought and lost their lives in the War between the States.”

The statue’s removal ended a saga that divided the state-sponsored military academy in Lexington, Va., whose graduates include a recent Army secretary, the governor of Virginia, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a civil rights hero and the late actor Fred Willard. For a small group of VMI alums who had been pushing for change at the 181-year-old school, it was a victory—but only a first step.

The four activists, men in their 40s, had all once considered themselves conservatives. A Marine officer, a corporate lawyer, a civil engineer and a former Fox News correspondent, they treasured their unorthodox college experience, from the intentionally dehumanizing freshman “ratline” to the nearly two centuries of military history. But the events of recent years had awakened them, like many Americans, to the injustice all around them, and they had come to see the school’s continuing veneration of its Confederate past as an embarrassing stain. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder, removing the statue, they believed, was necessary but not sufficient to root out the racism plaguing their alma mater.

Many of their fellow grads did not agree. The ensuing controversy toppled the school’s leadership and imperiled its funding. An independent investigation, ordered by the state, is probing the racial climate on campus after reports of racist behavior, from lynching threats to the disproportionate disciplining of Black students. And the institutional resistance the change agents faced radicalized them.

Their fight is a parable for our times. Recent years have seen a rapid, massive shift in America’s collective racial consciousness. At the height of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, one poll found the proportion of Americans who see racism as a “big problem” had surged to 76%, a 25-point increase in five years. It is the most profound shift in racial attitudes in a generation or more.

The change is likely just beginning. So is the backlash. Conservative politicians and right-wing media are decrying “cancel culture.” States are pursuing bans on “critical race theory” at public schools. Wokeness—a term that originated in the Black community and has become a touchstone for advocates and critics alike—is now the central axis of American political controversy.

Thrown by the cultural upheaval, institutions like the military, corporations and professional sports teams are trying to find their footing. What feels to liberals like an overdue breakthrough strikes conservatives as a sudden personal attack. And as our still contested history shows, fights like the one at VMI will reverberate into the decades to come.

occupied a central position in front of the hulking, Gothic barracks that house VMI’s 1,700 undergraduate “cadets.” The freshman “rats” were long