Thank you for allowing extra space in the Gazette-Journal for Letters to the Editor that reflect very different opinions regarding changing the name of Lee-Jackson Elementary School and removing the Confederate memorial in Gloucester County’s Court Circle.

I grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in the 1940s and ’50s, where the ugly reality of racism permeated every aspect of our lives—separate and unequal schools, economic opportunities, housing, public transportation, recreation facilities … you name it. Black people were intentionally and systematically deprived of the right to vote, and consequently also deprived of fair representation either locally or at the state level. Hypocrisy—painfully shameful to remember now—reigned throughout our public school and Sunday School curriculum. The attitudes, language, and abbreviated history of the “War Between the States” offered to us by our politely Southern schoolteachers (“Plantation owners were kind to their ‘darkies.’”) were based in a t...