Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Virginia, will keep its name after the board of trustees of the private liberal arts college rejected an effort to reconsider paying homage to Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
June 4, 202111:47 am
CHANGE COMING: To Lee Chapel, where a statute of Lee lying behind this speaker is to be walled off in the future. Images of Washington and Lee also are to be removed from the university diplomas.
Alumni of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. (I am one) were just informed by e-mail that the University Board of Trustees had voted 22-6 not to change the name.
Advertisement
I’d been told last week that signers of a letter from some of the school’s biggest donors, including from Arkansas, had already been informed the name would not change. I have no reason to doubt the influence of money on the decision.
Washington and Lee University announced that it would keep its name after months of deliberations in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests across the U.S.
The words evoke a crime spree that ended violently and dramatically 36 years ago this week.
On June 3, 1985, a Chevrolet Blazer driven by Fritz Klenner exploded on a highway in the town of Summerfield, some 12 miles north of Greensboro.
The bomb that caused the explosion also killed Susie Newsom Lynch, his first cousin, lover and co-conspirator.
Her sons, John and Jim, were in the Blazer and already dead â poisoned and shot â when she or Fritz flipped the switch.
An hour earlier, Fritz had used an Uzi in an attempt to gun down police officers in Greensboro. He wounded two officers, one seriously.