Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Seeking Return of Confederate ‘Gray Ghost’ to Ranger Memorial at Fort Moore
Corey Dickstein, Stars and Stripes, December 17, 2024
A federal judge on Monday dismissed an Army Ranger foundation’s lawsuit seeking the reinstatement of a prominent Confederate officer’s name to the Ranger memorial at Fort Moore.
U.S. District Judge Clay Land wrote he was unpersuaded by the National Ranger Memorial Foundation’s arguments that the Defense Department overstepped its authority in removing the name of Confederate Col. John S. Mosby from the Georgia post’s monument. The judge wrote the Pentagon acted appropriately and lawfully in removing Mosby’s name under the 2020 law that established a method to remove items honoring the Confederacy and those who served it voluntarily from U.S. military installations.
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Last year, the National Ranger Memorial Fund, which oversees fundraising and upkeep of the memorial, sued the Defense Department and top officials, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, seeking to return Mosby’s name to the monument. They argued the Naming Commission, a panel created by Congress to study and make recommendations on removing Confederate-tied items from the Defense Department, omitted Mosby’s name on the Ranger memorial and in the Ranger Hall of Fame in its massive list of items for removal in the annex of its first of three official reports.
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The judge wrote Mosby’s induction into the Ranger Hall of Fame and inclusion on the memorial as a prominent Ranger spanned only from his time as a Confederate officer, thus meeting the legal criteria for removal.
“Mosby’s Ranger tactics and methods may be worthy of admiration and respect in some quarters,” Land wrote. “But other Americans may genuinely conclude that the development and deployment of them as an officer of the Confederate States of America in an open rebellion against the United States adds a treasonous taint that overcomes the appropriateness of any tribute to the effectiveness of some specific maneuver or survival technique.”
Land was nominated to the federal bench in 2001 by President George W. Bush and was a former city councilor for Columbus and a Republican state senator in Georgia.
