By Trevor Hunnicutt
FORT BRAGG, North Carolina (Reuters) -U.S. President Donald Trump said on Tuesday the military would rename bases which were changed after racial justice protests in 2023, including reverting to Fort Lee originally named after Civil War-era Confederate commander Robert E. Lee.
Under the Trump administration, the Pentagon has already renamed Fort Moore back to its original name of Fort Benning and Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg.
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been able to sidestep a Congressional provision that banned bases having Confederate names by renaming bases after people with the same names as the Confederate officials.
“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort AP Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said while speaking at Fort Bragg.
“We won a lot of battles out of those forts. It’s no time to change,” Trump said as uniformed service members stood behind him.
Fort Lee, located in Petersburg, Virginia, was renamed Fort Gregg-Adams in 2023. After Trump’s announcement, the Army said that Fort Lee would be renamed after Private Fitz Lee, a Medal of Honor recipient from the Spanish-American War.
During Trump’s speech at Fort Bragg, some audience members, including those in uniform, cheered as the president made the announcement. They also jeered at the press as Trump pointed towards reporters and called them “Fake News” and applauded as he took shots at his predecessor, Joe Biden.
Uniformed members of the U.S. armed forces are meant to be apolitical, carrying out the policies of Democratic and Republican administrations.
The 2023 move to shed Confederate names for military bases came in the wake of nationwide protests after the 2020 death of George Floyd, a Black man killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Confederate flags and base names can be offensive to many Americans, who see them as reminders of the enslavement of Black Americans and symbols of white supremacy.
Congress in 2021 passed legislation forbidding the naming of bases after anyone who voluntarily served or held leadership in the Confederate States of America, the breakaway republic of Southern states that fought against the U.S. in the Civil War in the 19th Century.
(Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt in North Carolina, Idrees Ali and Phil Stewart in Washington D.C.; Editing by Stephen Coates)
