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Friend,
The nickname “Rebels” for the sports teams at Southwestern High School in Hanover, Indiana, has nothing to do with the Confederacy, school officials there have long claimed.
The school superintendent, in fact, says the name came from the iconic 1955 James Dean movie Rebel Without a Cause.
But that makes little difference to Julie Patterson, an alumnus who started a campaign to “Retire the Rebel” after her comment about the nickname “blew up” a school alumni page on Facebook.
“If you’re a person of color, I would imagine that the Rebels would color your thinking about what kind of town you’re moving to,” Patterson told the Southern Poverty Law Center. “It’s a signal. It talks about your community. Why wouldn’t you want to change it so that everyone feels welcome here? Why remain so stagnant?”
The fact is, regardless of the nickname’s origin, Confederate imagery was used in association with it almost immediately after the school opened in 1960 – in the midst of the civil rights movement – and continued to be used for many years, according to WFPL radio, an NPR affiliate in Louisville, Kentucky.
WFPL reported that the school’s 1963 yearbook featured a Confederate soldier on the cover and that there were “more obvious references coming in the 1980s and 1990s,” including several depictions of the Confederate battle flag. A Confederate soldier had also appeared on the 1962 yearbook cover, Patterson said.
A 2019 graduate who played in the pep band told WFPL that a “Colonel Reb” character was sometimes depicted on flags waved by students at sports events and that it wasn’t uncommon to see students wearing clothes with Confederate symbols. Nowhere to be seen was any kind of James Dean likeness.
Patterson’s campaign comes at a moment of national reckoning over race and the country’s history of white supremacy – and schools and sports teams across the country are grappling with issues involving their names and what they symbolize.
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In solidarity,
Your friends at the Southern Poverty Law Center
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