For decades, students at Robert E. Lee High School in Tyler, Texas, have sung their alma mater at pep rallies, assemblies, sporting events, and other functions. Robert E. Lee we raise our voice in praise of your name But not everyone cherishes the song. Joralen Mauldin, 16, a black junior at Lee, read the lyrics her freshman year and cringed. "It's kind of like an unspoken rule for black students … [we] don’t like the song because you know that it’s honoring General Lee," she said. "A lot of black students … don't [memorize] the words." Mauldin, a member of the high school's drill team, has relegated the song to background noise and learned to tune out the verses. A school building named after the Confederate general, though, is harder to ignore. "It makes me … upset and uncomfortable," she said. "I feel like I’m being transported back in time to when it was okay to be openly racist." The legacy of the Confederacy (the Southern states that fought against the Northern states in the Civil War) has long been a source of conflict across the U.S., pitting those who claim pride in the South's history against those who see… Read full this story
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