The U.S. Navy has changed the name of a Naval Academy campus building that formerly held the name of a Confederate leader to honor former Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

The Naval Academy building initially honored Matthew Fontaine Maury, an oceanography trailblazer also known as “pathfinder of the seas” who “resigned his U.S. commission” to join Confederate Naval forces, Navy Times reported.

Now, the building will bear the name “Carter Hall” after the 39th President of the United States, Jimmy Carter.

The building was named in 1915, along with two other fixtures, which were named for Franklin Buchanan, the academy’s first superintendent who later rose through through ranks of the Confederacy to become an admiral.

The name change effort was provoked by Congress in 2020, which commissioned a name-change committee to re-examine Confederate nomenclature on federal buildings following the death of George Floyd.

Renaming the DOD academic building will reportedly cost the academy $12,000. . . . (Daily Caller)

The Naming Commission Strikes the Naval Academy (American Spectator, 19 FEB 23)

Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro, who previously identified climate change as the greatest threat to U.S. national security, has renamed Maury Hall at the U.S. Naval Academy to honor Jimmy Carter, a Naval Academy graduate (class of 1946) and former president of the United States. Del Toro’s action is part of a broader effort by Congress’ Orwellian “Naming Commission” to cleanse the country of any historical figure associated with slavery, the Confederacy, or racial segregation.

As this is being written, news reports state that the 98-year-old former president is receiving hospice care at his home. The official statement issued by the Carter Center says, “After a series of short hospital stays, former U.S. President Jimmy Carter today decided to spend his remaining time at home with his family and receive hospice care instead of additional medical intervention.”

One can wish the former president well, but the judgment of history should not be clouded by sympathy or emotion. Jimmy Carter was one of the worst presidents in American history, and the Naming Commission and Del Toro have done a disservice to the nation.

Maury Hall was named after Matthew Fontaine Maury, one of America’s and the world’s great naval pioneers, but who committed the unpardonable sin of serving in the Confederate Navy after Virginia, his home state, seceded from the Union. Del Toro, in announcing the name change, stated, “I can think of no one more worthy of this renaming than President Jimmy Carter.”

Perhaps the secretary is unaware of Carter’s, shall we say, complicated history on race and civil rights, as well as his near-treasonous efforts to undermine U.S. foreign policy during the first Gulf War in 1990–91.

As Hans A. von Spakovsky notes in a piece for National Review, Carter in his autobiography Keeping Faith wrote that he “was not directly involved in the early struggles to end racial discrimination.” He sure wasn’t.  . . . (read more)