This Tennessee Elementary School Had a Mural of a Lynching Still Up. In 2018.

The number of Confederate monument removals has diminished sharply since the violent white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, this past summer that left one young woman dead, but schools across the country remain on the front lines of this divisive debate about the legacy of the Civil War.

Over the past few weeks school districts in Austin, Texas, and Petersburg, Virginia, have chosen to rename buildings that honor Confederate leaders and/or remove Confederate symbolism such as the battle flag on school grounds.

Last week school administrators in Crossville, Tennessee, ordered the modification of a large Confederate battle flag painted on a school’s gymnasium wall and an adjacent mural that required little imagination to be interpreted as a lynching at South Cumberland Elementary School.