REPORT: West Point Has Had A KKK Plaque On Campus For Decades

REPORT: West Point Has Had A KKK Plaque On Campus For Decades

Harold Hutchison on August 31, 2022

Cadets at the United States Military Academy walked beneath a plaque commemorating the Ku Klux Klan for decades, according to a report released Monday.

The Naming Commission, a panel with the mandate to suggest the removal or renaming of DOD assets commemorating the Confederacy, noted the plaque, which depicts a hooded member of the white supremacist group holding a rifle with the words “Ku Klux Klan” underneath, in its report on buildings and other military assets named for Confederates or the Confederacy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York, and the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland. The plaque is mounted at the entrance of Bartlett Hall Science Center.

The commission did not recommend removing the plaque, since the Ku Klux Klan was formed after the Civil War and therefore outside its purview, according to The New York Times, but it noted its presence and included a picture.

“The reason that we put that in there was because we thought it was wrong,” Ty Seidule, a retired Army brigadier general who serves as vice chairman of the panel, told the NYT. “When we find something that’s wrong, but it’s not within our remit, we wanted to tell the secretary of defense about that.”

West Point should remove KKK plaque on science building: congressional panel https://t.co/IRHL4Htl08 pic.twitter.com/t5kdHRYMoA

— New York Post (@nypost) August 31, 2022

Two other plaques at the entrance of Bartlett Hall featured Confederate generals, including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and J.E.B. Stuart, according to the commission’s report. The commission recommended that the plaques “be modified to remove the names and images from the panels that specifically commemorate individuals who voluntarily served in the Confederacy.”

The Naming Commission’s report also targeted the Reconciliation Plaza, which was installed in 2001 to commemorate acts between 1861 and 1913 that were seen as “examples of reconciliation,” due to its depictions of some Confederate generals. The plaza was a gift from the United States Military Academy’s class of 1961, according to the Historical Marker Database.

The United States Military Academy and the Naming Commission did not immediately respond to requests for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.