Showing posts with label TheEmancipator. Show all posts
Showing posts with label TheEmancipator. Show all posts

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Black and Latino pedestrians face a higher risk of death while walking

Published in The Emancipator (a joint venture between the Boston Globe and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research); co-written with Alex LaSalvia


Gallivan Boulevard is a four-lane, arterial road that cuts right through a largely residential community in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. At the intersection of Gallivan and Dorchester Avenue, pedestrians heading to school, work, or a neighbor’s house have to cross a slip lane for right turns without a walking signal.

Then they wait up to two minutes on the pedestrian island before crossing four lanes of traffic on a worn-out crosswalk in 25 seconds or less.

“The highway department … wanted to speed everything up. This is a neighborhood, it shouldn’t have speedy roads, it should have things that are going to slow them down a little bit,” said Nancy Thornton, a longtime Dorchester resident who lives at the intersection with Dorchester Avenue.

That intersection was the site of the tragic death of 53-year-old Torrance Hodges, who was struck by a van while crossing the street in April.

“We watched the whole thing from our second floor,” Thornton said. “It was very, very sad.”

It’s not just chance that a road like Gallivan Boulevard runs through one of Boston’s most racially diverse neighborhoods. For decades, highways and roadways were constructed with little regard for increased traffic in Black communities. Sometimes they were intentionally built to divide and isolate those communities.

Across the U.S., Black and Latino pedestrians are more likely than White pedestrians to be struck and killed by cars when walking around their communities.

That’s the conclusion from The Emancipator’s analysis of national and city-level pedestrian fatality data from 2016 through 2020, which compared the locations of those deaths with neighborhood-level race and ethnicity data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2020 census. The analysis includes neighborhoods of the five largest U.S. cities — New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston and Phoenix — as well as Boston.

The following maps breakdown racial disparities of pedestrian deaths in those cities. The analysis includes interactive and searchable maps.

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Overall, there were more pedestrian fatalities in neighborhoods with greater racial and ethnic diversity — and, specifically, communities with lower proportions of White residents. This was true when analyzing data by census tract — a relatively small neighborhood-like area, an area that was usually home to between 2,500 and 8,000 people — or by county, or even by city-defined community regions like the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles or Boston’s South End.

There were many census tracts that saw no pedestrian fatalities from 2016 through 2020. But they were disproportionately inhabited by White people, 77% of whom lived in a fatality-free census tract.

Black people are 12.1% of the U.S. population, according to 2020 Census estimates, but 19.1% of the pedestrians killed; Latinos are 18.7% of the population and 19.2% of the pedestrian fatalities. By comparison, White people who are not Latino make up 57.8% of the U.S. population but 45% of the pedestrian fatalities from 2016 through 2020.

Asian Americans and people with multiracial backgrounds are less likely to be killed while walking than their prevalence in the nation’s population would suggest.

Even if the large percentage of pedestrian fatalities whose races were unknown or unreported were reclassified according to national proportions, Black and Latino people would still be disproportionately more likely to be killed while walking.



Dangerous roads put pedestrian lives at risk for the comfort of driving

People of color, those with fewer economic resources, and people with mobility limitations – such as those who need wheelchairs, walkers or other help getting around – are all at risk of being killed while walking, said Rebecca Sanders, founder of Safe Streets Research and Consulting and lead author of a study published last year that examines racial disparities and other related factors of pedestrian deaths.

“They don’t like feeling unsafe, but they don’t have another option,” she said.

The racial disparity in U.S. pedestrian deaths doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Cities and towns have been built to give cars priority, Sanders said. Even places touted for prioritizing pedestrians block pedestrian routes with major arterial roads — high-capacity roads that aren’t freeways but often have two lanes in each direction. Many of those arterial roads are state highways that cut through cities at the expense of pedestrian safety, Sanders said.

“If you want to go for a walk to a restaurant or a grocery store, you have to cross a major arterial to get there,” Sanders said.

Those wide roads with fast-moving traffic are where most pedestrian deaths occur, said Mike McGinn, a former mayor of Seattle who is now executive director of America Walks, a pedestrian-advocacy non-profit. Those arterial roads have fewer crosswalks spaced farther apart, and higher speed traffic than smaller, narrower neighborhood roads.

“Guess where those multi-lane arterials are found most often?” he asked. “It’s part of the deeper racial and ethnic inequalities in America.”

Freeways and arterials have long been pushed through Black neighborhoods, particularly during the highway boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Developers built apartment buildings along those roads, putting large numbers of people right in front of heavy, fast-moving traffic, McGinn said.

“Many times these wide arterials have no sidewalks at all. You’ll see a dirt path by the side of the road,” he said. But the dirt path, which emerges from persistent foot traffic, is important evidence: “We know people are there.”

Poles and signs found alongside roads are also indicators of risks of fast-moving traffic. They’re built to reduce the danger to errant drivers. “We design the poles to be breakaway poles because we know cars will leave the roadway and hit them,” McGinn said. “And then we tell people to walk right there.”

“We subsidize the driving comfort of some with the risk of death and injury or health issues for others,” he said.

Structural inequity makes pedestrian danger a race and class issue

Pam Jiner wants to “be able to walk to a practical destination, do what you need and make it back home safely.” But that simple goal is hard to reach.

Jiner is a community leader in Montbello, a neighborhood in the northeast section of Denver, that was built in the mid-1960s. The community had no sidewalks on key roads leading to a major intersection until 2020, Jiner said.

Montbello, home to almost 40,000 people, was once majority Black but is now 77% Latino.

And while Jiner has encouraged everyone in her community to get outside into nature, exercise, and see neighbors, she added, “we get out there and see all the obstacles that are in our way.”

To Jiner, the solutions are so simple it’s sad she has to point them out: “When you build a school, build crosswalks. When you build a park, build stop signs and crosswalks. Senior living facilities all deserve bus stops with shelters, covers over them.”

Instead, she saw roads where “pedestrians are putting themselves in danger” when they attempted to cross or while on sidewalks. Sometimes she would go for walks with local officials, where she would show off a new sidewalk, but they gasped in horror at how dangerous the environment remains for pedestrians. They would tell her, “you have sidewalks but it’s still not safe,” she said.

Jiner drew a parallel to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying public policies that put pedestrians of color at risk are further evidence of systemic racism.

She’s not the only one.

Jonathon Stalls, a self-described “walking artist” who walked across the U.S. over eight and a half months in 2010, and wrote a book about it, agreed. He said he saw what his friend and fellow Denver resident Jiner mentioned — structural racism tied to pedestrian safety —as “a consistent thing across the country.”

In his efforts to encourage people to walk or “move the way we’re made to,” Stalls paid close attention to the cars on the roads he walks along as well as other pedestrians.

He spoke of seeing older adults on their own and parents clenching the hands of young children, navigating multi-lane arterial roads or standing on the three-foot-wide cement platforms dividing the lanes of traffic. “The way that they’re standing and shaking and huddling is really loud to me,” he said. “They’re surrounded by hundreds of cars flying in all directions.”

Stalls said he’s fortunate not to have been hit by a car in all of his walking, but he’s had “a lot of close calls.” And on his nation-crossing walk, he saw roadside memorials to pedestrians killed “all the time.”

Stalls chronicled various walking experiences through PedestrianDignity, his TikTok account. Some of his videos might be comical if they weren’t so scary.

In one video, Stalls narrated his attempt to walk from a bus stop to a grocery store just blocks away. He showcased a beautiful, wide, smooth sidewalk perfect for pedestrians, including people using wheelchairs or walkers. But then he got to the property line, and the sidewalk stopped. A fence ran across the route, forcing him into the road alongside heavy vehicle traffic.

Timing his move carefully, and making clear he does not recommend anyone follow his example, Stalls ran past heavy underbrush and foliage that had overgrown the curb, spending eight seconds in the actual roadway before reaching relative safety: a stretch where the brush had been cleared, revealing a dirt path just inches wide. At least it was beyond the curb.

‘Make noise and get attention’ to spur progress for pedestrians

People aren’t powerless when it comes to pushing for improved conditions for pedestrians.

Guerrilla traffic cone placementroad blockades, and street art are just some of the methods people are using to reclaim the streets in their neighborhoods. Countless pedestrian safety groups have sprung up nationwide — there’s probably one in your neighborhood, and if not, there are resources for you to start one.

Change comes when communities make noise and create “a little bit of inconvenience,” said Ed Parillon, a bike and pedestrian safety advocate and member of Safe Street Rebel in San Francisco. Safe Street Rebel is an advocacy organization focused on direct action such as organizing people to stand in bike lanes to create barriers between cars and cyclists. The group has elevated issues like public transport investment and protected bike lanes.

“We still have a long way to go,” Parillon said, but protected bike lanes weren’t “even part of the conversation when I moved to San Francisco in 2008.”

In San Francisco, the difference in pedestrian safety in Black and Brown neighborhoods versus White affluent neighborhoods can be stark. Parillon lives in the Mission District, which doesn’t have the same walkability as the wealthier, whiter neighborhood of Noe Valley.

“It was really striking when I was walking around with my kids there versus in the Mission,” Parillon said. “You feel the safety on the street, you feel the lower stress levels when you’re walking places.”

Parillon credited spaces like Streetsblog, a news site advocating for the end of car dependence since 2006, for sparking his interest in advocating for safer pedestrian conditions. He recommended getting involved with local organizations focused on street safety.

“If you are someone from a minority community and you want to point out some of the street conditions that are dangerous in your neighborhood, I do think that there’s a lot of focus on that now,” Parillon said. “Get out there and make noise and get attention, because that’s the only way that this stuff makes progress.”


Methodology

The Emancipator analyzed data from New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix and Boston.

Fatal crash locations were compared with city limits, and assigned to census blocks, which were in turn assigned to community subdivisions, as defined by city officials. Three cities — LA, Chicago and Boston — called the community subdivisions “neighborhoods,” but they were called “community districts” in New York, “super neighborhoods” in Houston, and “villages” in Phoenix.

There were 33,375 records in the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s database of pedestrian fatalities from 2016 through 2020. Of those, 2,058 — 6% — were injuries and not fatalities. It was not possible to know where deaths occurred based on 167 of the records, 0.5%, because the latitude and longitude information was “unknown,” “not reported” or “not available.” When matched with census tracts, three had no census tract to match to, leaving 31,147 pedestrian fatalities from 2016 through 2020 to analyze.

When calculating pedestrian fatality rates by census tract, some tracts had very low populations, or even zero. So the analysis excluded tracts with fewer than 1,895 people — 5% of the maximum tract population of 37,892.

In the analysis within cities, the potential errors were very small: Phoenix’s share of crashes with unknown or unreported locations, 4.6%, was the highest among the six cities. And small proportions of each city’s reported crashes were non-fatal. Overall, just 9.6% of all the crashes reported in these six cities were excluded from the analysis.

Wednesday, October 19, 2022

Who is representing you? Federal and state governments are more White and male than the populations they serve

Published in The Emancipator (a joint venture between the Boston Globe and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research)

The nation is home to populations that are quite diverse in racial and ethnic backgrounds, and they are generally evenly split along gender lines. However, the governments that serve them are led by people who are disproportionately White and male, according to an analysis by The Emancipator.

The charts and maps below paint a picture of a country whose top government officials do not often share racial, ethnic, or gender-identity characteristics with those they serve. These representations are based on data from the U.S. Census Bureau, and federal and state executives, legislators, and judges.

“There’s a clear descriptive value in seeing people who look like you in public institutions. Namely, you feel like there’s the capacity for someone to represent you,” says Bridgett A. King, an associate professor and director of the Master of Public Administration Program at Auburn University. “You feel like it’s a space where people like you, across whatever demographic marker we’re using, are welcome and there’s opportunities. So there’s that, the optics.”

Shared identity can extend benefits beyond race, according to Spencer Piston, an associate professor of political science at Boston University. For example, he says, “Legislators of poorer backgrounds are more likely than rich legislators to look out for poor people’s interests.”

Our federal representatives don’t reflect us – especially in the Senate

At the federal level, the U.S. House of Representatives most closely resembles the United States as a whole in terms of racial and ethnic diversity. Just shy of two-thirds of House members identify as White; 12.5% of them are Black; and 9.5% are Latino, according to the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Senate, on the other hand, is the least representative of America’s racial diversity with 83% of its members identifying as White, 3% as Black, and 7% as Latino.

The federal judiciary is similarly split, with the U.S. Supreme Court having similar ratios as the United States overall, though without any Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, Indigenous people, or multiracial members. But the overwhelming majority of the 1,413 sitting federal judges identify as White, according to the Federal Judicial Center.

Forty-seven of those federal judges are of Asian American or Pacific Islander descent; and four are Native Americans: Diane Joyce Humetewa of the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona, Lauren Jennifer King of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, Frank Howell Seay of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Oklahoma, and Sunshine Suzanne Sykes of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California.

The top level of the executive branch is split between a White man, President Joe Biden, and a multiracial woman, Vice President Kamala Harris, who has both Black and Asian American heritage.

Some state governments reflect their state’s diversity, others fall far short

States’ executive branches are overwhelmingly White, with just three governors (Hawaii, New Mexico, and Oklahoma) identifying as having backgrounds other than White.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Hawaii’s legislature is the least White, with just 22% of its members identifying with that background, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Vermont and North Dakota are served by legislators who are 98% White. The Whitest state in the nation is Maine, where 96% of its lawmakers are White. Even so, those states’ legislatures are relatively representative of their majority-White constituencies.

Mississippi’s lawmakers are also relatively representative of their population: 57% White, 27% Black, and 14% other races in a legislature serving a population that is 56% White and 37% Black.

Starkly unrepresentative legislatures exist in Alaska, Delaware, and Oklahoma, where White lawmakers are much more prevalent than White constituents. In Delaware, a population that is just 61.5% White, residents are served by a legislature that is 85.9% White. That leaves a lot of people who may not find their interests, experiences, or needs shared or understood by those who hold power.

When it comes to judges at the state level, it’s a little more complicated, in particular because reliable data from the National Center for State Courts is only available for 25 states. Hawaii is again the least White with 21.8% of its judges identifying as such, 37.2% identifying as Asian American, and 20.5% identifying as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. At the other end of the spectrum is New Hampshire, where 100% of judges identify as White.

Majority-female nation, led mostly by men

The overall national population is slightly more than half female, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. But all three branches of the federal government are more male than the population. The Senate is the most male-dominated, with 76% of its members identifying as male, according to the Congressional Research Service. As the first female vice president in U.S. history, Harris makes the top of the executive branch an even gender split. The U.S. Supreme Court is majority male, with four of the nine justices being women.

States’ executive branches are male-dominated, with just nine governorships held by women as of September 2022.

The legislatures of Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, West Virginia and Wyoming have an overwhelming male presence. More than 80% of the legislators from those states are men, according to data from the National Conference of State Legislatures. Nine state legislative branches are relatively evenly split: Arizona, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Washington have male majorities, but women account for more than 40% of those lawmakers. Only Nevada has a majority-female legislature, with 61.9% of its members identifying as women.

When it comes to the judicial branch, limited data obscures the full picture. But what is available shows Nevada as the most equitable, with half of the judges being female, according to the National Center for State Courts. Alaska, California, Georgia, Hawaii, Kentucky, Maryland, Massachusetts, New York, and Oregon are relatively equitable, with less than 60% of their judges identifying as male. At the other end of the spectrum, in Alabama, Indiana, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and New Hampshire more than 70% of the judges are men.

King acknowledges that shared identity isn’t always a clincher in achieving an individual’s hoped-for policy goals. But, she adds: “In the context of the United States, one of the persistent and long-lasting markers of identity is race. So even if it’s a Black person who is conservative who doesn’t represent me, the presence of racial and ethnic minorities in positions of power is important for democratic representation and governance.”

Jeff Inglis is a Boston-based editor, writer and data journalist who has covered politics, technology, science and culture in various parts of the U.S., as well as New Zealand and Antarctica.

Thursday, October 6, 2022

U.S. military to stop honoring Confederate history — finally

Published in The Emancipator (a joint venture between the Boston Globe and the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research)

The Confederate States of America, the short-lived rogue collection of states addicted to slavery and its profits, will finally be put in its place, if the U.S. Department of Defense has anything to say about it. And a commission that has identified 1,111 items under military control — bases, buildings, streets, signs, and even a floor mat — most certainly does.

Findings from the Naming Commission that first met in March 2021 revealed a wide-ranging inventory of locations, items, and even software in military use around the globe. The goal is to remove all official commemorations of the Confederacy, “an act of rebellion. It was an act of treason,” according to Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.

The commission is chaired by retired Adm. Michelle Howard, the first Black woman to command a U.S. combat ship, the first Black woman to hold two-star and three-star admiral ranks, and the first Black person and the first woman to serve as vice chief of naval operations, the second-highest-ranking officer in the Navy. Most of the items are spread across 26 states. This includes seven states on the Union side and three that were not yet states at the time of the Civil War.

There are also items in Washington, D.C. — the Union’s capital city then and our country’s capital now. Still others are at U.S. military installations in Germany and Japan, which were not established until after World War II. These, of course, are not all of the monuments and memorials around the United States that commemorate the Confederate cause.

These symbols don’t exist as a result of accidents or coincidences. Nor were they part of efforts in the immediate wake of the war to “bind up the nation’s wounds,” as President Abraham Lincoln described it. They were created in the early years of the 20th century and remain echoes of a decades-long campaign to recast Confederate history. The real Big Lie, these efforts taught that the Confederacy was a noble “lost cause” attempt to maintain traditional American values, rather than a treasonous insurrection seeking to preserve slavery and the economic engine powered by the forced labor. The commission itself declared, “these names speak far more to the times, places and processes that created them than they do to any actual history of the Civil War, the Confederate insurrection, or our nation’s struggle over slavery and freedom.”

The military base names were among many — honoring both Union and Confederate figures — given to training camps assembled hastily in the run-up to both world wars. Spread around the nation for convenience and political reasons, their names were often picked by local officials who sought to honor their community’s history. Most of the camps, regardless of their namesakes, closed after the wars. But some remained and grew in size and importance over time.

Confederate symbols lurk in many corners

On the commission’s list are nine military bases named for Confederate generals. New names have already been proposed for these locations, subject to approval by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin III. The recommendations include changing the name of Fort Bragg in North Carolina to Fort Liberty, to capture the American ideal.

The other proposed names honor figures in U.S. military history. Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, for example, is the only woman to receive the Medal of Honor for her efforts to save wounded soldiers during the Civil War. Sgt. William Henry Johnson, a member of the first all-Black U.S. Army unit to fight in World War I, was belatedly awarded the Medal of Honor for single-handedly resisting a German attack. Gen. Richard Cavazos was the first Hispanic American to become a four-star general in the Army.

One other military base, Fort Belvoir in Virginia, is named for a plantation where enslaved people were imprisoned and worked. But because it is not named for a specific Confederate figure or event, the commission has determined the fort is outside its purview. The commission has recommended Pentagon officials rename it under the standard process for renaming of military installations.


Seven vessels are listed. One is a Navy warship named for a Civil War battle won by the Confederate army. Five others are landing craft operated by the U.S. Army and named for Confederate military victories.

The remaining one is an oceanographic survey ship, USNS Maury, named for Matthew Maury, who served in the U.S. Navy starting in 1825. He mapped currents and prevailing winds in ways that dramatically increased the speed of sailing. For that work, he is known as the father of modern oceanography and naval meteorology. However, in 1861, he resigned his commission in the U.S. Navy and joined the Confederate navy.

The inventory also details 14 markers, monuments or statues; 53 paintings, plaques, or portraits; 742 signs, maps, marquees, or displays; and a single floor mat at the Fort Lee commissary. It also includes specific screens in military computer systems, logos on vehicles, and other administrative changes.

The commission recently added references to military units’ battle flags, used at formal events and special occasions to signify the units and their heritage. The flags are often decorated with ribbons for particular awards the unit has earned or identify battles the unit has fought. An August 2022 inventory update added the battle flags of 48 units, which bear a total of 491 streamers commemorating the participation of those units, or their historical predecessors, in battles as part of the Confederate army, though now they are part of the U.S. military.

A September 2022 update recognized that symbols within the insignia for several units, such as a saltire — the X-shaped cross that forms part of the Confederate battle flag — and even the color gray were in some cases meant to honor the Confederacy.

Academy buildings honor traitors

Several of the items on the list are at places where the nation’s top military leaders are trained. They raise questions about how to honor U.S. history without glorifying the treason and rebellion of the Confederacy because the locations and items are named for people who distinguished themselves during loyal service to the U.S. military. They are also the same people who resigned their U.S. commissions to serve in the Confederate military, complicating any formal recognition of their roles in American history.

Consider Maury Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, which is named for the naval oceanographer.

Take the official residence of the Naval Academy’s superintendent, and the street it is on, both named for Franklin Buchanan. He served as a U.S. Navy officer for 45 years, proposed the creation of the Naval Academy, and served as its first superintendent from 1845 to 1847. Like Maury, Buchanan resigned his U.S. commission in 1861 to join the Confederate navy.

The commission has recommended the Naval Academy rename both buildings and the street.

The commission’s inventory lists 10 items at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York. Two are roads named for Pierre Beauregard and William Hardee, academy graduates and longtime U.S. Army officers who both resigned to serve in the Confederate army. The commission has recommended that the roads be renamed.

Seven other items specifically honor 1829 academy graduate Robert E. Lee. They include a barracks, a child-care center, a group of homes, a mathematics award, and images and quotations by him. From 1852 to 1855, he was West Point’s superintendent. In 1861, he resigned from the U.S. Army, joined the Confederate army, and ultimately became the top general.

The commission has recommended that five items be renamed and that one portrait of Lee in his Confederate uniform be removed.

The 10th item on the commission’s West Point list is a public space on campus called Reconciliation Plaza, dedicated in 1961 to “commemorate the reconciliation between North and South.” The plaza includes several markers with engraved images of several Confederate figures, including Lee. Monuments there commemorate the Confederacy, including a depiction of “Confederate forces in insurrection against Fort Sumter, South Carolina,” the event that opened hostilities in the Civil War.

The commission recommended several changes to the plaza, including the removal of the images that depict Confederate figures, and removal or modification of those that commemorate the Confederacy.


The commission’s report also identifies other items at West Point that are not on its inventory list. One is a set of three plaques at the entrance to Bartlett Hall, the academy’s science center, which portrays several Confederate figures, including Lee. The commission has recommended the plaques be changed to remove their names and images.

Additionally, one of the three plaques shows a hooded figure labeled with the words “Ku Klux Klan.” The commission has determined that this monument, like Fort Belvoir’s name, is not connected directly enough to the Confederacy to be under the commission’s authority. But members have nevertheless recommended that the Department of Defense develop policies to handle this and any other such markers or commemorations that may be discovered.

Another item not on the commission’s inventory list is a monument called the Honor Plaza, which includes a quotation from Lee identifying him as Maj. Robert E. Lee, his rank when he served as West Point superintendent. But the quote is from a time when he was serving in the Confederate army. The commission has recommended it and its reference to Lee be removed.

However, the commission has determined that any images or references to Lee during his time as superintendent at West Point and that “do not conflate his Confederate service are historical artifacts and may remain in place.”

There are also plaques inside buildings that depict the names of Fitzhugh Lee and Joseph Wheeler, West Point graduates who served in the Confederacy. The commission has determined those markers commemorate their Confederate service but has left their disposition up to West Point officials.

The commission has not identified any items that honor the Confederacy or Confederate personnel at the other Defense Department academy, the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Its review did not include the U.S. Coast Guard Academy, which is operated by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, nor the U.S. Merchant Marine Academy, which falls under the U.S. Department of Transportation.

What’s next?

The final section of the report recommended all other U.S. Defense Department assets and items — the ones that are not entire bases or housed at military academies — be renamed or have their Confederate-related insignia, markings, or references removed. There is an exception for items not in use, though the commission warned that if those items or insignia return to active use, they should first be altered to remove Confederate references.

The commission also noted that more items, locations, or other military property that honor the Confederacy are likely to come to light in the future. It recommended that those items also be renamed, removed, or modified.

In addition to Admiral Howard, other commission members include Brigadier Gen. Ty Seidule, a professor emeritus of history at West Point; Gen. Robert Neller, a former commandant of the Marine Corps; and Lt. Gen. Thomas Bostick, the first Black West Point graduate to command the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The commission also includes U.S. Rep. Austin Scott, whose district in Georgia contains Fort Gordon and Fort Benning, both named for Confederate generals. Scott notably voted in 2001 to remove the Confederate battle flag from Georgia’s state flag.

Jeff Inglis is a Boston-based editor, writer and data journalist who has covered politics, technology, science and culture in various parts of the U.S., as well as New Zealand and Antarctica.