A slim majority of Americans (52%) support efforts to preserve the legacy and history of the Confederacy, while 44% oppose such efforts, a new poll finds.

Why it matters: As Juneteenth gains popularity as a national holiday, most Americans still support keeping alive the "Lost Cause" myth, which arose after the Civil War and romanticizes the Confederate uprising, ignoring slavery as its root cause.

Juneteenth has been recognized as a US federal holiday since 2021 and acts as a day to celebrate the end of slavery in the country – but millions of Americans will not have the day off today, 19 June, to mark the occasion.

At least 30 states – including most recently Rhode Island and Kentucky – and the District of Columbia recognize Juneteenth as an official public holiday, according to the Pew Research Center.

A Virginia school board has approved a motion for two schools to revert to their Confederate names following a debate that bitterly divided a town.

The Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 to reinstate the names of Stonewall Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary in Quicksburg.

Community members had been pushing for a reversal, arguing the 2020 name change was unpopular.

The vote marked the first such U-turn anywhere in the US.

It was a choice to melt down Robert E. Lee. But it would have been a choice to keep him intact, too.

So the statue of the Confederate general that once stood in Charlottesville — the one that prompted the deadly Unite the Right rally in 2017 — was now being cut into fragments and dropped into a furnace, dissolving into a sludge of glowing bronze.

A statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee that stirred controversy and was a focal point of a deadly White Supremacist rally in 2017 has been melted down and will be used to make works of art.

The initiative, called "Swords Into Plowshares," is led by Charlottesville’s nonprofit Jefferson School African-American Heritage Center. According to the project's website, they plan on "including local community members as co-creators in the conception and design of the artwork."

The statue is being melted in a local foundry outside of Virginia, according to NPR.

A bronze statue of Confederate General Robert E. Lee has been “secretly” melted down by Charlottesville, VA’s black history museum due to fear of backlash over destroying the historic monument.

The statue of Lee, who was a revered Confederate Army general as well as a slave owner, was taken down in July 2021 at the behest of Virginia Governor Ralph Northam in the wake of protests by Black Lives Matter and the Unite the Right rally in 2017. The city council voted to have it removed and Northam backed them on it.

The U.S. Army base Fort Bragg in North Carolina is being renamed to Fort Liberty in accordance with the Biden Defense Department’s push to scrub the military of Confederate memorabilia, garnering harsh pushback from some veterans.

The renaming occurred in a small ceremony on Friday at the base, with signs being changed and the fort’s website edited to reflect the new name “Fort Liberty,” which was chosen out of 188 names by the Naming Commission. The base has been named after Confederate General Braxton Bragg since 1918.

A panel on May 24 unveiled its recommended new names for military facilities that were named in commemoration of the Confederacy and its leaders.

Fort Benning in Georgia should be renamed Fort Moore after Lt. Gen Hal Moore and his wife Julia, the Naming Commission said.

Additionally, the following names were proposed:

Much of human life is bound up with memory: whether in school, when one memorizes dates, grammar rules, and mathematical formulas; or in relationships, when one remembers birthdays or anniversaries; or as we age, when we remember good people and experiences. We tend to associate memory with wisdom, too. We remember the past—whether it be the good, the bad, or the ugly—in order to live wiser lives in the present.

When rioters tore through the U.S. Capitol last month, some of them gripping Confederate battle flags, they didn’t encounter a statue of the most famous rebel general, Robert E. Lee.

The Lee statue, which represented the state of Virginia as part of the National Statuary Hall Collection in the Capitol for 111 years, had been removed just weeks before — one of at least 160 public Confederate symbols taken down or moved from public spaces in 2020, according to a new count the Southern Poverty Law Center shared with The Associated Press ahead of releasing it.