Robert E. Lee’s Namesake

In many of the battles over Confederate leaders who are honored with building names and statues on campuses across the country, Robert E. Lee has not been seen as the worst of the worst. When the University of Texas at Austin removed a statue of Jefferson Davis in 2015, it let the statue of Lee stay. But after a deadly white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va. -- organized on the premise of protesting the planned removal of a Lee statue -- much has changed. Lee statues have since come down at UT and at Duke University. But if those universities were able to remove their statues, the challenges raised by Lee are far greater 70 miles away at Lexington's Washington and Lee University, which is named after both George Washington and Robert E. Lee.