Among the recommendations, the commission made after “deliberat[ing] extensively over the thousands of possible new names suggested” include former President Dwight Eisenhower, former Secretary of State and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, and abolitionist Harriet Tubman, AL.com explained.
These nine bases, which include Fort Polk in Louisiana, Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia, Fort Bragg in North Carolina, Fort A.P. Hill, Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia, Fort Rucker in Alabama, and Fort Hood in Texas, are all in former Confederate states and were named during the south’s Jim Crow era.
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In the 2021 National Defense Authorization Act, which sets the Defense Department’s annual spending and policy priorities, Congress mandated a commission be created to examine new names for bases with Confederate-linked names.
The commission intends to spend the following several months engaged with “installation leaders, personnel and their counterparts in local communities to discuss the names” before making its final decisions.
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“It's important that the names we recommend for these installations appropriately reflect the courage, values, and sacrifices of our diverse military men and women,” retired Navy Adm. Michelle Howard, the chair of the Naming Commission, said in a released statement. “We also are considering the local and regional significance of names and their potential to inspire and motivate our service members.”
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Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, the first Black person to serve in that position, is expected to announce new names for some of the country’s most iconic military facilities in 2023. The change sparked outrage and backlash as some claim that the Confederate tributes should stay as part of the military’s history and culture. The commission traveled to the base communities and met with residents last year and asked for recommendations through the internet.
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“Some of those suggestions on the website are quite intense,” Howard, who is Black, said in October. “There are some folks who are distinctly opposed, and the verbiage that [they] use is quite deliberate and they make it clear they do not support the commission.”
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Overall, the eight-member commission received 34,000 submissions with 3,670 unique names. It whittled that down to 100 candidate names for the Army bases. “We are grateful to the thousands of Americans who participated in this historic process,” the commission’s website read. “More than 34,000 submissions were received during this period and have been reviewed by the Commission.”