Trude Lamb’s letter to the Tyler school board last month was evocative and polite and blunt: No longer would she run cross country in a jersey bearing the name of a Confederate general, and, furthermore, the board should change the name of 62-year-old Robert E. Lee High School to something “we can all be proud of.”

Next thing you know, the letter went viral. Trude, a native of Ghana, became a national celebrity and local pariah, a symbol to some Tylerites of the outsiders who would wipe out their heritage in the furtherance of Marxism, even anarchy.

And so it went at a special meeting Thursday, livestreamed on YouTube, at which 40 citizens made pitches for and against before the seven-member board voted to change not only the name of Lee but the district’s other high school, John Tyler, on grounds that both were named after Confederates.

Of course, it wasn’t only Trude and her letter that “made history,” as a supporter put it. And it wasn’t outsiders, either. Unlike predecessors who kicked the can down the road for 50 years, the current board, including a former SMU football player, performed its duty. A former state senator and mayor, now chairman of Texas’ board of regents, had a hand in influencing the board.

Earl Campbell, too.

“You get the Tyler Rose,” said Marty Crawford, Tyler’s superintendent of schools, “how can you argue with that?”

Powerful voice

History: According to figures compiled by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Texas leads the nation in the number of schools named after Confederate figures at 34, nearly three times as many as runner-up Virginia and more than a third of the total nationwide. Since the summer of 2015, when nine Blacks at a Bible study in Charleston, S.C., were killed by a white supremacist who posted racist emblems and a Confederate battle flag on his website, a national recall has been in order. Texas alone has removed 33 Confederate symbols. Not that the wave of change didn’t meet occasional bulwarks.

At a Tyler school board meeting in the fall of 2017, Andy Bergfeld, a wide receiver at SMU in the late ‘80s and a member of one of Tyler’s most prominent families, posed a question:

“Is it right to force African-American students to attend a school named after the most famous and honored Confederate figure from a war whose underlying purpose was, directly or indirectly, to protect the institution of slavery?”

Bergfeld didn’t get any answers from the board or community then, and he didn’t press the issue. A motion came up at a board meeting in 2018, but it failed for lack of a second. Bergfeld didn’t think it was time. Events this summer apparently changed his mind.

Trude’s letter — opening as it did the soul of East Texas’ largest town for international inspection — reads, in part:

I am from Ghana, Africa, where slavery first began. I have stood in the dungeons of the slave castle and seen the three foot urine and feces stains on the walls where my brothers and sisters were kept. I’ve seen the tiny hole at the top of the ceiling where they would throw food in to the captured souls. I have walked through the “Gate of No Return” where over 12 million of my brothers and sisters were kidnapped never to return back to their home.

Trude wrote that she couldn’t attend or support or compete for a school “named after a person who was against my people right here in the United States.” Even worse, she told CNN, is the notion of singing the school’s alma mater:

Robert E. Lee, we raise our voices in praise of your name.

May honor and glory e’er guide you to fame.

Trude’s adoptive mother, Laura Owens, told CNN she wanted the name changed immediately, and if it wasn’t, she threatened a lawsuit for a violation of civil rights.

As you might imagine, reaction varied wildly. A fourth-generation nephew of Lee agreed it was time for change and praised Trude for her courage. Anonymous threats posted on social media by others underscored his sentiments.

On the other hand, Trude’s position allowed her to meet Earl Campbell, pride of Tyler and the greatest football player in the state’s glorious history. Before she left, he presented her with an autographed Oilers jersey inscribed with her full name: “To Gertrude.”

Along about the same time, Marty Crawford, Tyler ISD superintendent since 2014, got a call. It was Earl. The last time they’d talked was in 1994, at a Willie Nelson concert in Willie’s bus. Crawford figured he was calling to peddle a change at Lee.

“No, sir,” Earl told him. “I’m calling because I think it’s time we change both of them.”

Not just Robert E. Lee, then, but Earl’s alma mater, John Tyler, the school he’d led to a state football title in 1973.

Earl said it was important for everyone in the community — and important to their heirs, as well — “to know that these people stood up and did the right thing.” Certainly others contributed to what Crawford called a “shift” in the community’s thinking. The board, led by Wade Washmon and named last year one of the five best in the state by the Texas Association of School Administrators, was influenced by Kevin Eltife, a former state senator and Tyler mayor.

But it was Earl’s take that galvanized the John Tyler community and the town as a whole.

“When he was able to lend his voice to it,” Crawford said, “it became a Tyler thing.”

As for who influenced Earl, who’d pretty much remained a Black man apart in all these protests?

“I think when I read about Trude,” he told Tyler’s KLTV, “I said, ‘You know, there’s no sense in hiding it anymore.’”

Rebranding begins

The 40 Tyler citizens who voiced their feelings at Thursday’s board meeting had 80 seconds each to get it off their chests. More than a few failed to make deadline. A middle-aged white male with a ballcap pulled hard on his brow had gotten only to the point in his notes where he insisted that the Civil War wasn’t fought over slavery before Washmon politely cut him off. The speaker left without complaint.

All things considered, the speeches were remarkably civil given the temperature of some citizens. An elderly white male said he hated to see “our city in turmoil, which it is.” Like several who opposed change, he blamed it on outsiders. A Black female took exception, saying the African-American community in Tyler simply hadn’t been heard.

You could hear them Thursday. As a middle-aged Black male told the board that this could have been done long ago, his comments were all but drowned out by chants from outside the room.

Change the name ... Change the name ...

A middle-aged white male in a plaid blazer told board members they might as well do something, because it’ll happen eventually, anyway. Better to do it now and avoid hindering economic growth.

“We may be the last holdout of the Confederacy,” he added. “That’s not the message to send.”

Once the speakers were done, the board asked district officials for cost estimates on rebranding. Fritz Hager, executive pastor of Bethel Bible Church, as well as a West Point graduate and Silver Star recipient, told fellow board members he’d already talked to community members who said they would cover the costs.

Andy Bergfeld, who’d asked the board a question three years ago, finally had an answer. He’s no liberal. In fact, he called the “radical, progressive cultural revolution” sweeping America a threat to community and country. Even so, changing names, he said, didn’t check any boxes of the “cancel culture.”

“It’s not a political movement,” he said. “It’s what’s in my heart.”

The vote was 7-0 in favor. At Monday’s regularly scheduled meeting, the board will announce a naming process. Crawford recommended that, whatever they decide, just don’t name the schools after anyone this time.

And now, just for the record: On a number of occasions before his death in 1870, Robert E. Lee downplayed or discouraged monuments or memorials to the war. He was for reconciliation, not remembrance. In a letter declining an invitation to a Gettysburg memorial in 1869, he wrote that he thought it best “not to keep open the sores of war, but to follow the examples of those nations who endeavored to obliterate the marks of civil strife and to commit to oblivion the feelings it engendered."

My favorite Lee story begins with a woman who invited him to her home north of Lexington, where she showed him the remains of a once-magnificent tree, its limbs stripped and trunk shattered by Federal cannons. She’d left it, she told Lee, as a memorial to the pain the South had endured. If she was looking for affirmation from the great general, she was disappointed.

“Cut it down, my dear Madam,” he told her, “and forget it.”

Twitter: @KSherringtonDMN