In the United States, a military base named after a Confederate renamed
Fort Pickett in Nottowa County, Virginia, October 19, 2021. © Robert Burns / AP
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A symbolic change for a US military base. Fort Pickett, Virginia, changed its name on Friday, March 24, 2023. It must be said that it bore the name of a general of the confederation.
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With our correspondent in Washington, Guillaume Naudin
For more than 80 years and the creation of the camp that later became a fort, the people of County Nottoway had no questions. It was Fort Pickett, named after George Pickett, a local general.
But George Pickett was far from the sharpest bayonet of his generation. The last of his class at Westpoint, he is best known for the charge of Pickett, who sent his 1,500 men to their deaths at the Battle of Gettysburg, under General Lee, leader of the Southern armies in the American Civil War.
It is this southern commitment that no longer passes today. The army decided to rename several facilities that bear names from that hated era. A Fort Lee, still in Virginia, will soon bear the names of two African-American soldiers.
Renamed Fort Barfoot
In the meantime, Fort Pickett is now called Fort Barfoot. It is a tribute to a local soldier who, before the Korean War and the Vietnam War, distinguished himself in the Second World War to the point of receiving the Congressional Medal of Honor.
In Italy, he had neutralized alone two machine guns of the Nazi army that threatened his men, personally evacuating two of them for more than a kilometer before taking 17 prisoners in the enemy ranks, which is a little different from having defended slavery by arms.
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- United States
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