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A predominantly white city tucked away in the northwest corner of the U.S. hardly seems the logical spot to emerge as the new flash point of the protests against racism and police brutality that have raged across the country for nearly two months.

Then again, both Portland and its home state of Oregon have a troubled past that animates the ongoing demonstrations, now in their eighth week.

Add to that a president sinking in the polls and eager to rally his base behind a vow to “dominate the streets’’ in an election year, and suddenly Portland has been thrust into the national spotlight for something other than quirkiness.

Experts say the unrequested and unwelcome arrival of federal law enforcement agents in recent weeks and their violent recent confrontations with protesters in the city’s downtown have rekindled a movement that had been simmering down.

The Oregonian/OregonLive reported more than 2,000 people, many of them belonging to parent groups, turned out to protest against the federal intervention Monday night and into Tuesday morning. The officers guarding a federal courthouse eventually responded with gas and less-lethal munitions during a midnight confrontation that lasted nearly an hour, the news outlet said.

Oregon’s governor, U.S. senators and numerous other elected officials have demanded the federal agents be withdrawn, deeming their deployment an infringement on the state’s rights and a blatant political maneuver by President Donald Trump.

Some analysts agree.

“I think Trump wants to have this open and showy use of force,’’ said Joe Lowndes, a professor of political science at the University of Oregon. “In terms of a flagging presidential campaign, this is the way to fire up his base. It’s not as if they’re doing this on the sly. I think it’s meant as a very public show of – the term he would use is ‘dominance.’’’

For as much outrage and questions of constitutionality as the federal action in Portland has evoked, the longstanding demonstrations that began in the city shortly after the May 25 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police are more rooted in the state’s racist history than on recent events.

Oregon’s territorial constitution adopted in November 1857 – less than two years before it became a state – barred people of color from coming within its borders. It wasn’t until 1926 that the provision was repealed. Oregon imposed a tax on people of color in 1862, and racial exclusion laws and bans on interracial marriages were on the books for decades, the latter until 1951.

“That kind of set the template for what, many decades to come afterward, forms the racial exclusion, anti-Black hostility, housing covenants in Portland, Eugene and other cities that make it difficult for Black people to move in and work in Oregon,’’ Lowndes said. “It’s a white state by design.’’

Moms take action: ‘Wall of moms’ at Portland protest formed to protect demonstrators

According to a 2019 estimate by the U.S. Census Bureau, 87% of Oregon’s population of 4.2 million is white, and only 2% Black. Portland is not much more diverse, with whites making up 77% of its population of 655,000, and Blacks 5.8%. Latinos account for 9.7% of the total and their growing presence has evoked some resentment.

Christopher McKnight Nichols, who teaches history at Oregon State University and splits time between the school’s base in Corvallis and Portland, said the long trail of discrimination in Oregon informed the protests in a liberal city long known for its activism.

But he said they had tapered down, describing them as “peaceful, benign and boring’’ – until the feds took action. His comment was echoed by Oregon Gov. Kate Brown, who told PBS the actions of “Trump’s troops’’ were “simply like pouring gasoline on a fire.’’

Nichols said a fellow history professor from another college, Maureen Healy, was hit while near the moms’ group by one of the rounds fired by federal agents Monday night.

“There had been local activists who kept the fire burning, and now with the federal agents coming in, we’ve seen a reignition of the fire,’’ Nichols said. “I mean that both literally in terms of the unfortunate violence, but also figuratively because people are getting more excited and enthusiastic.’’

Nichols also pinned much of the blame for the continued animus from the crowds on heavy-handed tactics by the police department, which he said has a culture influenced by racism even though two of its last three chiefs – including the current one, Chuck Lovell – have been Black.

The department has drawn intense criticism for its use of tear gas, high-decibel alarms and projectiles in handling demonstrations. The department has also endured a startling amount of turnover at the top. In early June, Lovell became its third police chief in less than six months.

On Saturday, protesters lit a fire and sprayed graffiti on the building of the police union, which has been accused of obstructing reforms.

“Most protesters would tell you that the Portland Police Bureau has continued to exacerbate tension, that their escalation has been a big part of why that activism and protests have continued,’’ Nichols said. “And one more thing that’s really alarming is Portland police are now back doing more of this kind of escalation, almost keeping up with the Joneses of the federal forces in there.’’

Both professors pointed out the heated clashes with police and/or federal agents are limited to a small part of downtown, in contrast to statements by Chad Wolf, Acting Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that Portland is “under siege’’ by “violent anarchists.’’

The academics also said the demonstrations have broad-based support in Oregon’s largest city, but some believe that’s not nearly enough to heal the deep wounds inflicted by decades of discrimination.

Bobbin Singh, executive director of the Oregon Justice Resource Center – a nonprofit that provides legal services to people who have been impacted by the criminal justice system – said the state will have to confront its history of injustice to overcome its “original sin’’ of white supremacy.

That goes beyond anything that’s happening in the streets of Portland now.

“It’s very easy for people to say, ‘Trump is to blame,’’’ Singh said. “But unless Oregon engages in self-reflection and actually understands how all these systems have been complicit in sustaining white supremacy … we’re never going to be able to move forward.’’

Even though Oregon is led by a Democratic governor and legislature, a white nationalist ideology remains prominent, said Singh, whose organization is involved in litigation against the city of Portland and its police department. Experts say the Ku Klux Klan is still active in Oregon, and so are far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Patriot Prayer.

The latter is based in the Portland area, which doesn’t exactly bring to mind the comically progressive ethos depicted in the TV show “Portlandia.”

“Oregon is unique in that it’s viewed as being left of center, progressive, but when we really look at all this racial justice stuff, we are as bad as any other state you would stereotype from the South, or that have all these long historic racial justice problems that are better known,’’ Singh said. “But Oregon has this very dark history the country doesn’t know.’’

With the continuing protests and the attention they’ve drawn, that history is coming to light.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2020/07/21/portland-protests-fueled-oregons-very-dark-history-racism/5483884002/

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President Donald Trump did something very unexpected on Thursday: Speaking with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in a live phone interview, he said that he would most likely wear a mask while visiting Walter Reed medical center over the weekend, adding that “it’s fine to wear a mask if it makes you feel comfortable.”

His claim was surprising inasmuch as the president has been reluctant to wear a mask publicly prior to now. Indeed, Trump’s anti-mask behavior bucks the advice of public health experts, who agree that people should wear masks whenever they are in environments where they or others could be exposed to the coronavirus, not simply when they feel comfortable. Indeed, not only has Trump avoided wearing a mask until now, but he actively mocked his Democratic opponent in the upcoming election, former Vice President Joe Biden, for being responsible and doing so.

On the one hand, Trump is following a sad tradition of American presidents either taking risks with their health or covering up serious medical issues in order to seem tough. The key difference between Trump and his predecessors, however, is that they never did so in ways that directly endangered the health of the people around them or deliberately encouraged reckless behavior.

The most obvious instance of a president bucking medical wisdom resulted in that president’s untimely death. When 68-year-old William Henry Harrison refused to wear either a coat or a hat while delivering his nearly two hour-long inaugural address (the longest in history) during wet and freezing weather, he contracted what his doctor described as “pneumonia of the lower lobe of the right lung, complicated by congestion of the liver.” Harrison eventually died, after having served as president for only one month, making him both the shortest-served president and a cautionary tale about the dangers of not listening to your doctors.

(For what it’s worth, some modern epidemiologists argue that Harrison actually died of unrelated ailments that sprung from the disease-infested marshes near the White House. Even if that is true, though, his decision to not wear a coat or hat during bad weather remains undeniably unwise.)

Yet Harrison, for all of his hubris, did not put others at risk through his behavior. A similar observation can be made about presidents who infamously concealed major health maladies: Grover Cleveland covering up an oral tumor and instead undergoing a secret operation; Woodrow Wilson suffering a debilitating stroke and yet staying in power for the last year-and-a-half of his presidency; Franklin Roosevelt refusing to disclose that he was likely to suffer a stroke as he sought reelection in 1944 (he died a few months into the term he won that year); John F. Kennedy masking the chronic pain of Addison’s disease, colitis and severe back problems with methamphetamines. There are even rumors that Ronald Reagan began to succumb to Alzheimer’s while he was still in office and covered it up.

None of these actions, to be clear, were ethical. Each one deprived the American people of knowledge to which they were entitled about their leaders during major crises, like the 1890s economic depression, the Great Depression, the influenza pandemic, the aftermath of World War I, the closing months of World War II, the civil rights movement and the Cold War.

“All of those situations indicate dubious ethics, but [did not] endanger other people,” Allan Lichtman, a political scientist at American University, told Salon. “When Grover Cleveland goes offshore to have an operation for his cancer, he’s not endangering anyone else. FDR is not dangerous. His health helmets were not contagious, and neither were Wilson’s or Kennedy’s as far as we know. Like Trump, they were preserving their manly image. But unlike Trump, they were not endangering the people around them or endangering the American people in their own way.”

Regarding the latter observation, Lichtman stressed that one of a president’s responsibilities is to lead by example, and Trump is failing to do that when he refuses to wear a mask and acts like choosing to put one on should be optional.

“It’s a horrible message,” Lichtman explained. “It shows he doesn’t care about the health of his constituents. He cares more about his own image than he does about keeping the people around him safe.” Lichtman also pointed out that “there is nothing unmasculine about wearing a mask. It is not a show of weakness to wear a mask anymore than it is a show of weakness not to drive drunk.”

Salon also reached out to medical experts about the importance of wearing masks. They made it clear that there is no rational disagreement on this point: To protect yourself and those around you, you should wear one.

“Masks are important for catching droplets and microdroplet aerosols expelled while talking and breathing (not just sneezing or coughing), which was just recognized by WHO and 239 scientists,” Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, Senior Fellow at the Federation of American Scientists, told Salon by email. “Trump would be potentially at risk, if not for the daily immediate on the stop testing of everyone who approaches him in his surroundings. Anyone who tests positive is isolated and prevented from seeing him (already happened to a general who was about to visit him). Another reason that TESTING saves lives too, in addition to masks.”

Dr. Russell Medford, Chairman of the Center for Global Health Innovation and Global Health Crisis Coordination Center, made a similar point.

“Up to 40 percent of people infected with COVID-19 may have no symptoms, but by the simple act of talking have the potential of infecting others by expelling virus-containing droplets into the air,” Medford told Salon by email. “Multiple scientific studies demonstrate that masks can capture many of these droplets and thus reduce the concentration of virus expelled into the air.”

He added, “A recent analysis by the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation [IHME] at the University of Washington estimates that widespread use of mask could contribute to a reduction of  COVID-19 respiratory infections by up to 33%.  Furthermore, if 95% of the US population always wore masks in public, IHME models project that more than half the over 60,000 deaths that are predicted between now and October 1 would be avoided.”

Trump’s actions prior to and since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic have cost thousands of lives and plunged America into the worst economic crisis since the 2008 recession. In addition to disbanding the global health national security team in 2018 and calling for budget cuts to the Centers for Disease Control, he also denied that a crisis existed for more than two months after the coronavirus reached the United States and has peddled pseudoscientific cures to the general public. Indeed, the image of him refusing a mask is perhaps a fitting symbol for his approach to the pandemic.

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To the Editor:

Information on the natural history of asymptomatic infection with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) remains scarce.^1-3 The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19) on the cruise ship Diamond Princess led to 712 persons being infected with SARS-CoV-2 among the 3711 passengers and crew members, and 410 (58%) of these infected persons were asymptomatic at the time of testing (see the Supplementary Appendix, available with the full text of this letter at NEJM.org).^4,5 Here, we report the natural history of asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection in part of this cohort.

A total of 96 persons infected with SARS-CoV-2 who were asymptomatic at the time of testing, along with their 32 cabinmates who tested negative on the ship, were transferred from the Diamond Princess to a hospital in central Japan between February 19 and February 26 for continued observation. Clinical signs and symptoms of Covid-19 subsequently developed in 11 of these 96 persons, a median of 4 days (interquartile range, 3 to 5; range, 3 to 7) after the first positive polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test, which meant that they had been presymptomatic rather than asymptomatic. The risk of being presymptomatic increased with increasing age (odds ratio for being presymptomatic with each 1-year increase in age, 1.08; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.01 to 1.16). Eight of 32 cabinmates with a negative PCR test on the ship had a positive PCR test within 72 hours after arrival in the hospital but remained asymptomatic. In total, data on 90 persons with asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection, defined as persons who were asymptomatic at the time of the positive PCR test and remained so until the resolution of infection (as determined by two consecutive negative PCR tests), were available for analysis (Fig. S1 in the Supplementary Appendix).

Figure 1. Figure 1. Crossing-Point Values in RT-PCR Testing of Asymptomatic Persons with SARS-CoV-2 Infection.

Included in the analysis are persons who had at least one positive polymerase-chain-reaction (PCR) test for severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) in the hospital. With fluorescence-based real-time reverse-transcriptase PCR (RT-PCR), the number of cycles at which the fluorescence signal from amplification exceeds the background fluorescence level is determined as the crossing point (Cp), threshold cycle, or other measures by different instrument manufacturers. A lower value correlates with a higher copy number of the target nucleotide sequence.

The group of persons with asymptomatic SARS-CoV-2 infection consisted of 58 passengers and 32 crew members, with median age of 59.5 years (interquartile range, 36 to 68; range, 9 to 77). A total of 24 of these persons (27%) had coexisting medical conditions, including hypertension (in 20%) and diabetes (9%). The first PCR test at the hospital was performed a mean of 6 days after the initial positive PCR test on the ship. The median number of days between the first positive PCR test (either on the ship or at the hospital) and the first of the two serial negative PCR tests was 9 days (interquartile range, 6 to 11; range, 3 to 21), and the cumulative percentages of persons with resolution of infection 8 and 15 days after the first positive PCR test were 48% and 90%, respectively. The risk of delayed resolution of infection increased with increasing age (mean delay in resolution for an increase in age from 36 to 68 years, 4.41 days; 95% CI, 2.28 to 6.53) (Figure 1).

In this cohort, the majority of asymptomatically infected persons remained asymptomatic throughout the course of the infection. The time to the resolution of infection increased with increasing age.

Aki Sakurai, M.D.

Toshiharu Sasaki, M.D.

Fujita Health University, Aichi, Japan

Shigeo Kato, Pharm.B.

Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare Nagoya Quarantine Station, Aichi, Japan

Masamichi Hayashi, M.D., Ph.D.

Sei-ichiro Tsuzuki, M.D.

Fujita Health University, Aichi, Japan

Takuma Ishihara, M.S.

Gifu University Hospital, Gifu, Japan

Mitsunaga Iwata, M.D., Ph.D.

Zenichi Morise, M.D., Ph.D.

Yohei Doi, M.D., Ph.D.

Fujita Health University, Aichi, Japan

[email protected]

This letter was published on June 12, 2020, at NEJM.org.

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A vaccine is just exposing yourself to a little bit of the bad thing that can kill you.

But when did we first get the idea to inject ourselves with something that can kill us, in order to save us?

On today’s show we trace the 2000-year history of the very first vaccine. We go from Ancient Greece to Imperial China to Britain. And we learn how this led to an achievement we’d love to repeat again now with the coronavirus — completely eradicating a deadly disease.

Music: “Love Is Hard,” “Seismic Encounters,” and “Time Traveler’s Checks“

Find us: Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / TikTok

Subscribe to our show on Apple Podcasts, Pocket Casts and NPR One.

Inoculate yourself with a weekly dose of economics and subscribe to the Planet Money’s Newsletter.

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The US Army currently has 10 bases and facilities named after leaders of the Confederacy. Within the next few months, that number could possibly drop to zero.

On Monday, Army spokesperson Col. Sunset Belinsky told Politico that “The secretary of defense and secretary of the Army are open to a bipartisan discussion on the topic.”

That’s opened the door for the Army to reverse its long-held position on keeping the names honoring Confederate officers. The Army defended such a stance as recently as February, with a spokesperson telling Task & Purpose, “The Army has a tradition of naming installations and streets after historical figures of military significance, including former Union and Confederate general officers.”

But the nation’s oldest military service has come under renewed pressure in recent months to change that practice. In February, the Marines signaled that Confederate-related items — including the Confederate battle flag — would no longer be permitted on its bases and officially followed through last week. In May, the New York Times editorial board wrote a scathing piece arguing the military celebrated white supremacy, in part because of the 10 installations’ names.

More recently, the protests sparked by the police killing of George Floyd have prompted states like Virginia and Florida to announce plans to remove Confederate statues. Now, some of the Army’s most revered retired generals and former top civilian leaders have come out in support of the Pentagon’s seemingly more open stance.

“If the former Confederate state of Virginia can remove the statue of General Lee from Richmond, the capital city of that Confederacy, today’s Army ought to be able to respond to the realities of today as well,” John McHugh, who served as secretary of the Army from 2009 to 2015, told me.

The US Navy has taken a cue from all that’s going on, with Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday announcing Tuesday that the service would prohibit the Confederate battle flag in any public or work spaces, including ships, aircraft, submarines, and bases.

If the Army were to follow through, experts say the next step would be for current Army chief Ryan McCarthy to issue a memo to change the names or seek support from the armed services committees in Congress to approve changes in a forthcoming, must-pass budget authorization. However, it’s unclear if either move is on the near horizon.

For many, such a move is long overdue.

“Bases that continue to bear the names of Confederate soldiers and officers — persons who wrongly fought to protect the institution of slavery and would have denied black Americans from serving in the military — are a reminder of that systemic oppression we continue to confront and damages the culture of inclusivity needed to accomplish the mission,” Rep. Anthony Brown (D-MD), a retired Army colonel and vice-chair of the House Armed Services Committee, told me.

“Removing these names will be another step in an honest accounting of our history and an expression that we continue to strive to form a more perfect union,” Brown, who is African American, said.

Why the Army named bases after Confederates in the first place

The history of naming Army installations after Confederate officers is deeply intertwined with America’s long history of racism.

As the nation mobilized for both world wars, political leaders amended Jim Crow-era laws to allow more minority troops into the military’s ranks. Perhaps the most consequential amendments were made to the Selective Service Act of 1940, which required men between 21 and 45 years of age to register for the draft.

Two amendments to the law, one by Sen. Robert Wagner (D-NY) and another by US Rep. Hamilton Fish (R-NY), allowed black Americans and other minorities to volunteer for war or be drafted. The final text of the statute read “there shall be no discrimination against any person on account of race or color” in selecting or training men in the military services.

The Pentagon’s official history of racial integration in the armed forces concluded that, with varying degrees of success, such changes “actually spread federally sponsored segregation into areas where it had never before existed with the force of law.”

Most of those areas were in the South. Mike Jason, a retired Army colonel who commanded troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, told me the region had lots of cheap land, which is why the Army in the early 1900s built bases and other facilities there. As a way to appease racist white political leaders and locals who didn’t want a more integrated military nearby, the Army named bases after Confederate “heroes” who were popular among these leaders and locals.

That’s why all 10 facilities named after those men are in the South: three in Virginia, two in Louisiana, two in Georgia, and one each in Alabama, North Carolina, and Texas.

And the Confederate officers the Army chose to name the bases after weren’t just selected at random or because of their military prowess during the Civil War. Most were specifically chosen because of their local ties. For example, Gen. Robert E. Lee and Maj. Gen. George Pickett, both Virginians, have bases named after them in the state.

Take Fort Gordon in Georgia, first established as Camp Gordon in 1916, smack in the middle of World War I. It’s named after Lt. Gen. John Brown Gordon, one of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s most trusted officers. Gordon was elected to the US Senate in 1872, but he was also widely known as the head of Georgia’s chapter of the Ku Klux Klan (a charge he, as leaders of the organization often do, denied).

By the time of his death in 1904, according to the New Georgia Encyclopedia, he was for many “the living embodiment of the Confederacy.”

Many weren’t even particularly effective military leaders.

Pickett led the infamous Pickett’s Charge at the 1863 Battle of Gettysburg straight into opposing guns, helping the Union win that fight and turning the tide of the Civil War. Had the Confederacy prevailed in the battle, it might’ve continued northward to overtake Union territory.

Despite that massive blunder and the fact that he fled to Canada to avoid execution as a traitor, Virginia’s Camp Pickett was dedicated in 1942, earning the larger “fort” designation in 1979.

Gen. Braxton Bragg was, in the words of Iraq War veteran Fred Wellman, “a jackass and an asshole.” Bragg, whose father owned enslaved people and who would later own enslaved people himself, had such a notoriously bad temper that Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant in his memoirs recalled a story of one of Bragg’s superiors admonishing him: “My God, Mr. Bragg, you have quarreled with every officer in the army, and now you are quarreling with yourself!”

What’s more, he lost big in the 1863 Battle of Chattanooga, leading him to resign from the Confederate army. Yet, the largest military installation in the world by population — North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, founded in 1918 — bears his name.

“We are forcing our black soldiers to serve on a base named after leaders who served to keep them in chains”

The issue of what an Army base is named isn’t trivial: It has an actual effect on the thousands of black Americans and other minorities who put on the Army uniform every day to serve their country.

“We are forcing our black soldiers to serve on a base named after leaders who served to keep them in chains,” Wellman said.

Bishop Garrison was one such soldier. In the summer of 2000, the then-21-year-old spent a summer training at Fort Polk in Louisiana, named after Lt. Gen. Leonidas Polk.

Polk, who was a slave owner and an Episcopal bishop in addition to being a Confederate officer, made one of the Confederacy’s biggest mistakes when he sent troops to overtake Columbus, Kentucky. His incursion led the state’s lawmakers to request help from the Union, thus ending Kentucky’s neutrality in the war.

Training at Fort Polk for a few weeks as a cadet didn’t sit well with Garrison. “The Confederacy, particularly as a black man from the South, was a shadow you couldn’t escape,” he told me. “We should have never named anything or erected effigies in the name of Confederates.

“Symbols of oppression need to be removed, and the military would continue to set the great example as it has throughout history by renaming its bases,” he continued.

Which raises the question: Why has it taken so long for the Army to even consider changing these bases’ names?

It depends on whom you ask.

The Army has dragged its feet on this issue for years

Experts have offered three main explanations — some more convincing than others — for why those 10 facilities haven’t had their names changed: 1) the pervasiveness of the Lost Cause myth in Army culture, 2) bureaucratic inertia and competing problems, and 3) courting controversy.

Let’s start with the first point. Retired Army Gen. David Petraeus, one of the service’s most celebrated leaders before an ignominious fall, wrote an op-ed in the Atlantic on Tuesday describing how Confederate culture has persisted in the Army.

“When I was a cadet at West Point in the early 1970s, enthusiasm for Generals Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson was widespread,” Petraeus wrote. “We were not encouraged to think deeply about the cause for which they had fought, at least not in our military history classes. And throughout my Army career, I likewise encountered enthusiastic adherents of various Confederate commanders, and a special veneration for Lee.”

Wellman, who attended the famed Army academy in the 1980s, told me that continued after Petraeus’s day. During the 1980s, professors taught him and his peers — one of his classmates was current Army Chief of Staff Gen. James McConville — about the Lost Cause: the “collection of historical myths meant to whitewash the hard truths of slavery and the Civil War,” as historian William R. Black has defined it. The lessons treated those myths as more or less truth, rather than a competing narrative to dispel.

And while the West Point campus features a gate, barracks, and a statute all dedicated to Lee, the academy only got a statue of Union General (and later US president) Ulysses S. Grant — a West Point alum — last year.

“The Army, like every other large institution in America, has been shaped by the Lost Cause mythology,” Jason, the retired Army colonel, said.

As to the second point, McHugh, the former top Army civilian, told me the service just hasn’t really had time to deal with this issue. “During all my time in the Pentagon, we were in two very bloody theaters of war that consumed most all of the bandwidth,” he said. “While in retrospect there should have been, there simply wasn’t the national level of discourse we see today that often leads to those kinds of decisions.”

Others who served in the Army told me that’s an understandable position, as the service always has a lot going on trying to keep Pentagon bosses, lawmakers, and the American people happy and its troops alive. Add two wars on top of that, and any free time on the calendar quickly goes away.

But others contend that’s just an excuse. The secretary could simply write a memo and the bases’ names would change. Politically, it’d be better to have the defense secretary and key members of Congress on board, but that doesn’t negate the fact that the names could be changed with the stroke of a pen.

McHugh, however, told me this issue never came up during his time in charge of the service — though it was certainly discussed numerous times in public discourse during his tenure.

And it’s worth noting that after the 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, debate about changing the 10 facilities’ names started up again, though the Pentagon did little about it.

Perhaps that inaction had to do with the final explanation, which is one the Army has repeatedly used: that changing the names would stir up immense controversy within the ranks. Take, for instance, the response to a request from Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) in 2017. She asked the Army to rename two streets at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn: General Lee Avenue and Stonewall Jackson Drive.

When the Army wrote back, Diana Randon, who was at the time the service’s top official on these issues, said the two men were “an inextricable part of our military history.” Such a move would be “controversial and divisive,” she continued, and “contrary to the Nation’s original intent in naming these streets, which was the spirit of reconciliation.”

Of course, as discussed above, that is a blatant misrepresentation of why these individuals’ names were chosen. They were deliberately chosen to appease racist people, particularly in the South — not to achieve some kind of national “reconciliation.”

“That guy, any day of the week, is better than Braxton Bragg”

Clearly, it makes no sense for the Army to keep these names. But that still brings up an important question: which names to replace the Confederates with?

Most I spoke with said Army leadership should put down multiple names on a list — say, 100 — and then put together a commission of experts to pick the best 10. But there are many different ideas about which names should appear on such a list.

One from Sandy Apgar, the former head of Army installations, is to rename the facilities after their locations, like Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. “By naming places, not people, the military can better exemplify its values of honor, sacrifice, and community,” he wrote in the New York Times last month.

Another is to give the spotlight to distinguished service members from minority communities. Experts I spoke with mentioned Medal of Honor recipient Sgt. Roy Benavidez, a Latino soldier who rescued eight members of his patrol after their helicopter crashed in Vietnam and came under intense enemy fire.

After getting stabbed with a bayonet, he continued to fight and pull troops onto another evacuation helicopter until he could no longer move or speak. As he was placed in a body bag, he spat on the doctor’s face to prove he was still alive. He died in 1998.

Retired Army Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, who commanded Fort Benning in Georgia, tweeted on Tuesday in support of renaming that base as Fort Omar Bradley.

Henry Benning, a brigadier general in the Confederate army, was a pro-slavery politician who became a top advocate for secession after Abraham Lincoln became president. Bradley, by contrast, was a World War II hero and the country’s last surviving five-star general, helping troops make it from the Normandy landing all the way into Germany to help win the war.

“Bad policy that such important Army posts be named after traitors,” Eaton tweeted. “Time for change.”

Another suggestion is Sgt. 1st Class Alwyn Cashe, a black soldier who received a Silver Star after pulling six wounded soldiers out of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle in 2005 in Iraq. He suffered burns on more than 70 percent of his body doing so and died from those injuries.

Asked by the Stars and Stripes newspaper what compelled him to keep going back into the fire, he said “I had made peace with my God, but I didn’t know if my men had yet.”

“That guy, any day of the week, is better than Braxton Bragg,” said Jason, the retired Army colonel, which is why he finds the Army’s inaction on renaming the bases until now “inexcusable.”

“There is no reason to delay this decision another day,” he said.

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The post A history of civil unrest in the US: Frustrations over injustice, slow pace of change | Nightline appeared first on Virus Reports.

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The post Considering history, COVID-19 is hardly a plague appeared first on Virus Reports.