Five years after shedding Confederate moniker, a West Texas high school may be Lee High again

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MIDLAND — La’Toya Mayberry is proud of many things.

She’s proud of her family’s West Texas roots. She’s proud of her two daughters, Aniyah and Erinn, two formidably academic athletes who are continuing the family’s basketball legacy.

And five years ago, she was proud of the Midland Independent School District. Its board of trustees had voted to rename a school carrying the name of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee, which she considered a stain on the community, to Legacy High School.

That pride may soon give way to shame. A new configuration of the Midland school board is set to consider reverting the school’s name to Midland Lee, affixing Lee’s legacy once more. A vote may come as early as Tuesday.

“My daughter is going to this school, and she's an athlete, representing the school, not just in Midland, but when we travel,” Mayberry said of her youngest, Erinn, a junior varsity basketball player. “What does this say to her that you want to restore a name that meant whites only?”

The debate in this West Texas town echoes a renewed national debate over honoring the leaders of the Confederacy, particularly in the South.

Midland ISD was part of the movement to remove the names of buildings and statues in public places honoring Confederate leaders like Lee, following the Black Lives Matter protests. The cultural tide has shifted with President Donald Trump’s return to the White House and his crusade against “wokeness.”

Earlier this year, Trump ordered the military to undue the changes made by the Biden administration to scrub the names of Confederate leaders from military bases. That included changing Fort Cavazos, near Killeen, back to Fort Hood. This time, however, the name of the base honors a World War I veteran Col. Robert B. Hood.

Midland ISD Vice President Josh Guinn, elected in 2024, announced his intentions to rename Legacy High School on July 4. He said the name Lee honors the “patriotic legacy that binds us,” and a “symbol of our shared pride.”

Guinn did not respond to an interview request.

Tommy Bishop, a school board members for nearly 20 years, said he learned of Guinn’s plans on Facebook. He did not disclose whether he would support Guinn on Tuesday, but he would prefer that another committee be established to choose a new name.

Guinn’s supporters said naming the high school Lee has nothing to do with the country’s Confederate history or slavery. Instead, it’s about retaining the aspects of the school they’re proud of, like the celebrated Midland Lee Rebels, its football team. Tim Lirley, an alumnus whose two daughters graduated from the high school before and after the name was changed, said Guinn is doing the right thing by preserving it.

“Everybody wants to be a Lee Rebel,” he said. “Nobody wants to be a Robert E Lee.”

Nearly 40 schools in Texas have retained an association with the Confederacy by name, according to data maintained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Should Guinn succeed, Midland will join the roster.

To Mayberry, civic leaders and families who send their kids to the district’s schools, it is a step backward for a community that they said has worked to distance itself from an era of slavery and racism and make all families feel welcomed.

“When you allow a little thing,” like a name, said John McAfee, one of the district’s retired teachers who taught when its classrooms were still partially segregated, “everything is affected.”

Legacy

Legacy High School opened in 1961. The original name, Robert E. Lee High, was approved by the school board 4-2. The name was chosen as a snub to the U.S. Supreme Court’s orders to desegregate schools, said Daniel Harris, a theologian in Midland who has researched the issue of the school’s name.

The Midland community has, during the last six decades, sporadically debated the name, the school’s mascot, the Rebels, and the other symbols tied to the Civil War and slavery.

In 1991, Rick Davis sat at a school board meeting where the board debated whether students should be allowed to use the Confederate battle flag as a school symbol.

That debate stuck with Davis for decades. And in 2020, as school board president, he was part of the coalition that approved dropping Lee.

“Changing the name would not be an effort to erase history,” he wrote in a July 2020 essay for the local newspaper. “Instead, remembering history is what should cause us to change the name of the school that was so named in a misguided attempt to honor such history at that particular time.”

Later, he added: “It is also about moving forward to reflect the character of our remarkable community.”

As part of the renaming process, the board established a committee to brainstorm options. The group proposed three suggestions. Among them was Legacy of Equality and Excellence, or L.E.E. for short, which garnered the most votes from the committee.

Davis rejected the proposal, arguing it did not distance itself enough from the Confederate general. Ultimately, the board settled on Legacy.

The move disappointed Bishop, the sitting board member, who said the committee selected a name and the board’s role was to adopt it. When the board last changed the name, it cost the district about $2 million to update school uniforms, band uniforms and other signage on the school's premises. Changing the name again could cost the school roughly $20,000, Bishop said, although the number is not final.

“I just think there should have been some collaboration,” Bishop said. “If you’re going to ask for a committee to be put together and then you don't support it, then what’s the point?”

Davis’ critics angered by the name change called him a “woke liberal.”

Davis, an elder and trustee of the First Presbyterian Church of Midland and a decades-long civic leader, has served in the top ranks of the local Republican party, advancing conservative causes. He has been the precinct chair, eventually rising to county chair. He also served as county chair and regionally co-helmed George W. Bush’s gubernatorial campaign in Midland. In the last three presidential elections, he has voted for Donald Trump.

For his critics, his act to rename the school outweighs his political advocacy and is tantamount to a betrayal of the community’s values. Davis has stuck by his choice.

“There's nothing patriotic about what Robert E Lee did,” Davis told the Tribune. “He rejected his sworn oath to defend the United States, and he took up arms against the United States, and he did so to allow states to continue to enslave people, and that's just wrong.”

Football

The Midland Rebels, the school’s storied football team, has produced an impressive roster of players who disagree on whether their legacy hinges on the school’s name, and others who are afraid it would disappear without it.

Lirley, who played for the football team from 1994 to 1996, said the old name has brought the school national notoriety. He said that for him, it was never an issue of race or slavery. When he was a student, everyone was proud to be a Lee Rebel, he said.

It represents “generations of people,” who played football, volleyball and played instruments in the band. Removing the name, he said, takes away the school’s heritage, adding it is an effort led by people with liberal-leaning political views who he believes are encroaching on the city.

“We don’t have a whole lot here besides oil and football, and whenever you start stripping that away from us, it gets pretty tough to have a real good community,” he said.

Despite the name change, the school maintained its mascot, the Rebels. Its depiction, formerly that of a Confederate soldier, was changed to a soldier from the American Revolutionary War, which the committee created by the former board recommended.

John Norman, a Midland City Council member who graduated from the school under the old name, said the school can preserve an identity it can be proud of without it. An athletic powerhouse in the 1990s, Norman’s name resides in the Texas High School Football Hall of Fame.

“It’s bigger” than football, Norman said, “and it’s a slap in the face of Black people” to return the school’s old name.

The week before the board was set to discuss Guinn’s proposal, families on both sides of the issue said they may find different schools for their children depending how the vote goes.

Mayberry attributed her daughter’s academic and athletic successes to the local school district. When she learned the school board would discuss reverting the name of the High School, she said she wouldn’t send her youngest there anymore.

Mayberry and her husband, Edward, said academic performance is a “driving force” in the household, a requirement their daughters must meet to play basketball. Aniyah and Erinn have been on the honor roll every year. They’ve taken rigorous advanced placement courses. Aniyah, the oldest and a freshman at Midland College, obtained certifications as a nursing assistant and phlebotomist before starting her freshman year. Erinn, like her older sister, plays for the varsity basketball team. The girls work at the family-owned child care center. The family has run child care centers since 2019.

Mayberry said she felt vindicated and seen as a member of the community after the name change in 2020. The name Lee, she said, cannot be separated from its association with slavery, which the general fought to uphold.

“I felt like we were showing the world that we were moving forward and that we have evolved and changed,” Mayberry said. “How dare we decide to even think about going back? I just can't comprehend why we would even waste tax dollars to go backwards.”

Erinn said she doesn’t want to leave. That’s where her friends are. Her first basketball game with her sister — which they won — was at the school’s court. Switching schools means becoming ineligible to play basketball in her last year of school, per the district’s policies. If she had to, she said, she would not put up a fight.

By reverting the name, “you’re undoing what (the students) have created now,” Mayberry said. “You’re undoing that legacy to keep your legacy.”

Lirley, who shares Guinn’s desire to change the name, is also waiting for the board’s decision. On Thursday afternoon, days before the vote, Lirley took his two youngest sons to a nearby park. Lawson and Greyson are still infants. But one day, Lirley hopes that they’ll go to the same high school and watch the celebrated football team on the field he once played in.

Lirley said the board members should let the public decide in a vote. But if it does not go his way, he will move his boys to private school.

“I’ll go to another school if I have to start over,” Lirley said. “But I’m not going to go back to a school that you stripped out from under us all and then expect us to start running back to you like you did something great, because you did nothing great for the community.”

Disclosure: Southern Poverty Law Center has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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