Collective Memory and Racialized Punishment in Schools Named After Confederate Figures

Abstract

Currently, more than 250 public schools in the United States are named after Confederate leaders who actively fought to preserve slavery in America. This history, however, is implicitly omitted when their names are emblazoned over the entryway to a school. The current research considers how the use of Confederate names at the school level impacts how individuals construct and interpret both the Confederacy and the history of white racist violence in the South more generally, by linking Confederate naming to racialized punishment outcomes. To do so, we combine data from 65,820 schools in the US Department of Education's Civil Rights Data Collection for 2017–2018 with data on Confederate naming of schools from the Southern Poverty Law Center and use both bivariate and multivariate analyses to examine school characteristics associated with Confederate naming, as well as the impact of Confederate naming on racialized punishment. Results reveal that Confederate-named schools (1) have larger Black populations and (2) are more punitive, especially toward Black students, than non-Confederate schools. These findings suggest the need for Confederate-named schools to be renamed, at the very least, as a preliminary step toward addressing the structural disadvantages producing negative racialized outcomes for Black students.