COMMENTARY | Jacksonville, aided by civic institutions like this very newspaper, has historically done a pretty good job simultaneously suppressing its rich Civil Rights history and glossing over its racist track record with a friendly chamber-of-commerce shine, and thus some people in town are under the mistaken impression a handful of Duval County s public schools were named after a rogues gallery of Confederate leaders for reasons
other than contempt for the city s Black residents.
Jacksonville was neither a consequential theater in the Civil War nor a particularly valued place in the minds of Confederates. In the years prior, this port city attracted merchants from the North who imported their pro-Union sentiments in large enough numbers they were on the verge of attaining local political power. During the war, the Union occupied the city four times. Confederates had their share of looting and burning the town as they scurried away. The closest semblance to an event of