The private women’s liberal arts school said the policy stems from the legally binding will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Sweet Briar’s leadership said the document requires it to “be a place of ‘girls and young women.’”

The phrase “must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written,” Sweet Briar’s president and board chair wrote in a letter earlier this month to the college community.

The new policy requires an applicant to “confirm that her sex assigned at birth is female, and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman.”

“Sweet Briar College believes that single-sex education is not only our tradition, but also a unique cultural and social resource,” President Mary Pope Hutson said in a statement to The Associated Press.

The new guidelines are facing criticism from some students and most faculty. They warn the politically fraught policy could repel potential students — not just transgender women — when women’s colleges have been closing, going co-ed or merging with other schools. Sweet Briar nearly shuttered in 2015.

Critics also question the board’s originalist interpretation of a will that explicitly excluded non-white students.

Williams’ will said the school was to be a place “for the education of white girls and young women.” The college had to get permission from a federal judge to accept Black students after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

John Gregory Brown, an English professor and faculty senate chair, said the reasoning for the transgender policy is “absurd.”

“Williams also wouldn’t have entertained the notion that somebody who was disabled would be a potential student,” Brown added.

On Monday night, the faculty voted 48 to 4, with one abstention, to call on the board to rescind the policy, Brown said.

Sweet Briar has about 460 students — known as Vixens — and was established in 1901 on Williams’ estate, a former plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

On Aug. 10, the Sweet Briar College Student Government Association stated the policy was “alienating, unnecessary, and it reflects the rise of transphobia in our country.”

Association President Isabella Paul, a senior who identifies as nonbinary, told the AP that at least 10% of students use different pronouns and wouldn’t fit in the policy’s description of women.

“And there are allies here who may identify as women but have friends and lovers and family members who are nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender,” Paul said. “So this is also affecting their pride in their institution.”

It’s unclear how the policy will affect current students. When asked, Sweet Briar’s president said the school tries “to ensure that all of our students feel welcome on campus.”

Hutson acknowledged that a board member has resigned over the policy and that alumnae on both sides “care deeply about the future of our college.”

“Many want Sweet Briar to remain a place where women can thrive, and they believe that a broader policy is a slippery slope toward co-education,” Hutson said. “They strongly support this policy.”

Women’s colleges in the U.S. began to admit transgender women about 10 years ago, including Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College, a historically Black school in Atlanta.

“What it means to be a woman isn’t static,” Mount Holyoke’s then-President Lynn Pasquerella told the AP in 2014. “Early feminists argued that reducing women to their biological functions was a foundation of women’s oppression.”

Currently, 23 historically women’s colleges have policies that admit at least some trans students, said Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Beemyn, who tracks such policies, said three historically women’s colleges bar most trans women, including Sweet Briar.

Admissions policies at private undergraduate colleges are exempt from Title IX, the 1972 law that bars sex discrimination in education. So Sweet Briar would not be affected by the Biden administration’s new rules under Title IX, which restrict discrimination based on gender identity.

Most Republican state attorneys general are challenging those rules in court. And judges have halted enforcement in 26 states, including Virginia, while the cases proceed.

But schools, including Sweet Briar, would not be shielded from any private lawsuits filed by current students, said Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney with LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal.

Hite said Sweet Briar’s policy could be problematic because it explicitly attempts to define for current students what it means to “live and identify as a woman.”

“That’s something that every cis and trans woman should be able to decide for herself,” Hite said.

Sweet Briar lacked a stated transgender admissions policy until this year, according to the letter from school leadership. The college was previously handling applications case by case.

But then the Common Application, a nonprofit that helps students apply to schools on one standardized form, added more options for a person’s legal sex, “X” or “another legal sex.”

Sweet Briar’s leadership said the additional options created confusion and challenges for applicants and school staff.

Emma Steele, a Common Application spokesperson, said in a statement that the changes “were all made to better reflect the more than one million students who use Common App each year.”

Sweet Briar almost ceased being a school in 2015. Its then-leadership announced its closure and cited financial challenges, declining enrollment and other problems.

The school was saved after multiple lawsuits, prolonged negotiations and the raising of millions of dollars by its fiercely determined alumnae.

Sweet Briar is one of 30 schools listed as members of the Women’s College Coalition. The U.S. had more than 200 women’s colleges in the 1960s.

The faculty senate president said the new policy will likely shrink the pool of already precious applicants.

“It really excludes any student who would be offended by those positions … who doesn’t want to be in a place where discrimination is codified in this way,” Brown said. “I think it’s a financially disastrous decision for the college.”

But the U.S. said in court filings last week that it may wage court battles over future expeditions if they break a federal law and an agreement with Great Britain to treat the wreck as a gravesite.

The litigation began last year after RMS Titanic Inc. announced the expedition, which is now scheduled for mid-July. The Georgia-based company originally planned to take images inside the ocean liner’s severed hull and to retrieve artifacts from the debris field.

RMST also said it would possibly recover free-standing objects inside the Titanic, including from the room where the sinking ship broadcast its distress signals.

The U.S. filed its legal challenge in August, arguing that entering the Titanic — or physically altering or disturbing the wreck — is regulated by the 2017 federal law and pact with Britain.

Both regard the site as a memorial to the more than 1,500 people who died when the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in 1912. Among the government’s concerns is the possible disturbance of artifacts and any human remains that may still exist on the North Atlantic seabed.

In October, RMST said it had significantly pared down its dive plans. That’s because its director of underwater research, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, died in the implosion of the Titan submersible near the Titanic shipwreck in June.

The Titan was operated by a separate company, OceanGate, to which Nargeolet was lending expertise. Nargeolet was supposed to lead this year’s RMST expedition.

RMST stated in a February court filing that it will send an uncrewed submersible to the site and only take external images.

“The company will not come into contact with the wreck,” RMST stated, adding that it “will not attempt any artifact recovery or penetration imaging.”

The U.S. government stated in a June 27 court filing that it’s ending its legal efforts against the expedition because of the company’s revised dive plans.

But the government said future expeditions could be illegal. It noted that the firm’s longer-term objectives still involve the possible retrieval of objects from inside the wreck and surrounding debris field. For that reason, the U.S. said it wants to leave the door open for future legal battles. Specifically, the government said it may still pursue last year’s motion to intervene as a party in RMST’s salvage case with a federal admiralty court.

RMST has been the court-recognized steward of the Titanic’s artifacts since 1994. Its last expedition was in 2010, before the federal law and international agreement took effect.

The company has recovered and conserved thousands of Titanic artifacts, from silverware to a piece of the ship’s hull, which millions of people have seen through its exhibits.

U. S. District Judge Rebecca Beach Smith is the maritime jurist who presides over Titanic salvage matters in Norfolk, Virginia. She said during a March court hearing that the U.S. government’s case against RMST would raise serious legal questions if it continues, while the consequences could be wide-ranging.

Congress is allowed to modify maritime law, Smith said in reference to the U.S. regulating entry into the sunken Titanic. But the judge questioned whether Congress can strip courts of their own admiralty jurisdiction over a shipwreck, something that has centuries of legal precedent.

In 2020, Smith gave RMST permission to retrieve and exhibit the radio that had broadcast the Titanic’s distress calls. The U.S. government responded by filing an official legal challenge against the expedition.

The court battle never played out. RMST indefinitely delayed those plans because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Smith noted in March that time may be running out for expeditions inside the Titanic. The ship is rapidly deteriorating.

His 1946 song “That’s All Right,” an easygoing shrug to a lover, would become the first single Elvis Presley ever released. Rod Stewart would sing it on a chart-topping album. Led Zeppelin would play it live.

But you wouldn’t have known it if you saw Crudup living out his later years on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, dressed in coveralls and leading a crew picking cucumbers, tomatoes and sweet potatoes.

Despite being dubbed “the father of rock ‘n’ roll,” Crudup received scant songwriting royalties in his lifetime because of a recording contract that funneled the money to his original manager. Crudup died 50 years ago, leaving behind one of the starker accounts of 20th century artist exploitation.

“Of course materialistic things don’t mean everything,” says Prechelle Crudup Shannon, a granddaughter. “But they took so much more than just money. They left him with all of the burdens of a poor Black man. And even more so because they left him with a broken heart.”

In recent years, Crudup has received flashes of recognition. He was briefly portrayed by Gary Clark Jr. in the 2022 biopic “Elvis” and mentioned last year by a California reparations task force examining the long history of discrimination against African Americans.

The 70th anniversary of Presley recording “That’s All Right” is Friday — many historians consider July 5 a cultural milestone — and comes as the state of Virginia plans a highway marker honoring Crudup.

“Among others who covered Crudup were the Beatles, B.B. King, and Elton John,” the marker will state. “Rarely receiving royalties, Crudup supported his family as a laborer and farm worker.”

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‘A brand new thing’

Crudup was born in 1905 in Forest, Mississippi, and started singing the blues when he was about 10, he told Blues Unlimited magazine. By 14, he was working in a foundry. It wasn’t until his 30s that he took up the guitar. Self-taught, he played parties and nightclubs in the Mississippi Delta.

In Chicago, seeking a better job, he busked and slept in a crate under an L station. One evening on a street corner, Crudup met Lester Melrose, a white field agent for Bluebird Records.

“He put a dollar in my hand and asked me to play,” Crudup told High Fidelity magazine.

Arguments abound over who wrote the first rock ‘n’ roll song. But “That’s All Right,” mixing elements of blues and country, stakes a strong claim.

“It doesn’t sound like country, it doesn’t sound like blues, although I can hear them in there,” says Joe Burns, a professor of communications and media studies at Southeastern Louisiana University. “It really is a brand new thing.”

Crudup recorded some 80 songs for Bluebird between 1941 and 1956, including “That’s All Right,” “My Baby Left Me” and “So Glad You’re Mine.” He held the rights to none.

His original manager had them.

“I wouldn’t record anybody unless he signed all his rights in those tunes over to me,” Melrose once said, according to Alan Lomax’s book, “Mister Jelly Roll.”

Crudup spent years off and on in Chicago, recording songs there and returning south by bus to work jobs in Mississippi. One was hauling trash for $28.44 a week.

“I had the family to take care of, a car note to pay off, a gas bill, a light bill,” Crudup said. He left music in his early 50s to work on farms.

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‘A kind of hillbilly record’

In 1954, Presley was on a break during his tryout session in Sun Studios when “this song popped into my mind that I had heard years ago,” according to Peter Guralnick’s book, “Last Train to Memphis.”

Sam Phillips, the studio’s legendary founder, immediately recognized Crudup’s song. Phillips was amazed the 19-year-old knew it and felt his version “came across with a freshness and an exuberance.”

A Memphis, Tennessee, radio station soon broadcast Presley’s recording. The response was “instantaneous,” with phone calls and telegrams asking the station to replay it, Guralnick wrote.

“It was by far Elvis’s biggest seller on the Sun label and set him off on what would soon become his almost unimaginable path to stardom,” Guralnick tells The Associated Press.

Although Crudup is often elided from accounts of Presley’s rise, the singer did publicly credit the songwriter.

“Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now,” Presley told The Charlotte Observer in 1956, “and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I’d be a music man like nobody ever saw.”

Crudup himself liked Presley’s interpretation.

“He made it into a kind of hillbilly record,” Crudup later told the Los Angeles Times. “But I liked it. I thought it would be a hit. Some people like the blues, some don’t. But the way he did it, everyone liked it.”

In the early 1960s, Crudup finally got a sizable royalty check — for $1,600. But Melrose refused to turn over the copyright.

Many Black musicians signed over copyrights or were forced to share them, Southwestern Law School professor Kevin J. Greene says.

“A huge chunk of what we’re talking about in terms of exploitation is still under copyright,” says Greene, who testified before the California reparations task force.

In 1971, Downbeat magazine estimated that Crudup probably should have earned over $250,000 — nearly $2 million today — from “That’s All Right” as well as “My Baby Left Me,” which Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded.

The American Guild of Authors and Composers even tried to collect royalties on Crudup’s behalf. But its then-managing director, John Carter, told High Fidelity in 1972 that Crudup had been paid “at most $2,500” from the guild’s efforts.

___

Playing in a packing shed

By his mid-50s, Crudup had settled in Franktown, Virginia. He was heartbroken by his experience, his granddaughter says. But he didn’t wallow.

“One of the things that my father emphasized was that he was an extremely principled man,” Shannon says of Crudup, who embodied “those old country values” of working hard and supporting one’s family.

Etna Nottingham Walker, whose family owned the Virginia farm where Crudup worked, says that “if you didn’t know that it was Arthur Crudup and he was a musician, you wouldn’t have singled him out.”

Butch Nottingham, Walker’s cousin, worked on the farm too. During breaks, he says, Crudup sometimes pulled out a guitar and sang in the packing shed where they washed and waxed cucumbers.

Crudup did eventually return to music, during the 1960s blues revival. Music producers from two labels, Fire and Delmark, tracked him down. He released new albums, played festivals and shared stages with B.B. King, Taj Mahal and Bonnie Raitt.

But Crudup continued to live on Virginia’s Eastern Shore, a narrow peninsula between the Chesapeake Bay and Atlantic Ocean. Shannon remembers her silver-haired grandfather holding her as a toddler on his Franktown porch, a cigarette dangling from his lips.

“He had these very, very long limbs,” recalls Shannon. “He just seemed like a giant to me.”

Tim Prettyman worked at the pharmacy where Crudup often picked up insulin, coffee and Camel cigarettes. One time, a suit-clad Crudup arrived with a guitar case, bound for a bus to New York and a plane to England.

“He said, ‘I’m going to play music for the Queen,’ and winked at me and smiled,” Prettyman remembers.

___

‘Ain’t meant to be’

Near the end of his life, Crudup almost got a settlement for $60,000, over $400,000 today.

Melrose was dead. A deal had been arranged with Hill & Range, the company that had acquired Crudup’s publishing rights.

But when Crudup and four of his children arrived in New York, they learned the deal was off, according to the book “Between Midnight and Day,” written by Crudup’s final manager, Dick Waterman.

They were told a settlement would cost the company more money than a potential lawsuit would yield. And suing meant “going after an old white widow who lives in Florida,” Waterman wrote. “We wouldn’t have a chance.”

“It just ain’t meant to be,” Crudup told Waterman. “Naked I come into this world and naked I shall leave it.”

Indeed, a settlement came only after Crudup’s 1974 death. Chappell Music refused to go forward with buying Hill & Range until the Crudup matter was resolved. The first check was slightly more than $248,000, Waterman wrote, with Crudup’s estate receiving around $3 million over the following decades.

Now Warner Chappell Music, the publishing company declined to comment because the events were so long ago.

Jeanette Crudup, the widow of Crudup’s son Jonas, says the payments to the musician’s children paled in comparison to what he should have received during his lifetime.

“They got the crumbs from it,” she says.

Crudup still remains relatively unknown, even on the Eastern Shore, says Billy Sturgis, a local resident who produced an album by Crudup’s sons. Sturgis hopes the historical marker will help. But, he says, Crudup belongs in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, alongside Presley and the many others who sang Crudup’s songs.

Crudup’s granddaughter agrees.

“It would be something if this story was unique,” Shannon says. “But it’s not. We know this has happened to Black artists throughout time, but specifically back then.”

FALLS CHURCH, Va. (AP) — One of America’s most conservative congressmen was locked in a tight renomination battle against an opponent endorsed by former President Donald Trump in Virginia’s primary election Tuesday.

Rep. Bob Good, who chairs the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, is seeking a third term representing Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, but state Sen. John McGuire has mounted a strong challenge that highlights frictions in the party.

Ballots remained to be counted, and the close margin made the race too early to call. Virginia observes the Juneteenth holiday and isn’t expected to count votes Wednesday as a result. McGuire led Good by 327 votes, or 0.52 percentage points, out of 62,495 ballots counted as of 12 a.m. Wednesday.

Meanwhile, Democrats in northern and central Virginia chose nominees to replace popular incumbents who aren’t seeking reelection. In House District 7, Eugene Vindman won a crowded Democratic primary to try to hold the seat being vacated by U.S. Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who is running for governor in 2025, while Republicans chose Derrick Anderson.

And in House District 10, voters chose Suhas Subramanyam from a field of 12 Democrats to try to hold the seat held by U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton, who is not seeking reelection to her northern Virginia seat after being diagnosed with a rare, incurable neurological illness. Republican voters nominated Mike Clancy for that seat.

Statewide, voters selected Hung Cao as the Republican nominee to the U.S. Senate to take on Democrat Tim Kaine.

Here’s a look at the major battles on the ballot:

House District 5

Conventional politics might suggest a congressman with the conservative credentials of Good would be safe in a primary. But he earned the wrath of Trump when he endorsed Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for president. He switched back to Trump after DeSantis dropped out, but Trump is endorsing McGuire and portraying Good as a backstabber.

Trump continued to bash Good as he campaigned for McGuire in a telephone rally Monday night.

“Unlike Bob Good, John McGuire will not let you down,” Trump said, adding that McGuire is “strong on the border” and “will always defend your under-siege Second Amendment.”

Good says he considers Trump the best president in his lifetime and only endorsed DeSantis because Trump is constitutionally limited to only one more term.

McGuire, for his part, claimed victory late Tuesday and thanked Trump for “believing in me.” No winner has been called by The Associated Press.

“There are still a few votes left to count, but it’s clear that all paths end with a victory,” McGuire said in a written statement.

Good, meanwhile, posted a statement on social media saying his campaign “implemented the best early voting operation that the 5th District has ever seen.”

“We are still waiting for the results of mail-in ballots and provisional ballots,” he said. “We are doing what we can to ensure we have teams of observers and legal counsel to ensure all the votes are properly counted in the coming days.”

Good also alienated Republican insiders by voting to oust House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, throwing the party into a measure of chaos.

Seeking to capitalize is McGuire, a state legislator and former Navy SEAL who has echoed Trump’s attacks on Good, calling him a “never Trumper.”

Good has bashed McGuire as a serial campaigner who announced his congressional bid just one week after winning election to a four-year term in the state Senate.

If Good loses, he would be the first House incumbent to go down to a primary challenge this year, with the exception of one race in which two incumbents faced off due to redistricting.

The winner will face Democrat Gloria Tinsley Witt, who defeated Gary Terry and Paul Riley.

The 5th Congressional District stretches from Charlottesville in the north, past the far western suburbs of Richmond, through Lynchburg and down to Danville and the North Carolina border.

House District 7

Vindman, a political newcomer who was nonetheless familiar to voters for his role in Trump’s first impeachment, has won the Democratic nomination in the 7th Congressional District for what will be a closely watched congressional seat in November.

Vindman, who crushed his opponents in fundraising, won in a crowded seven-person field that included four women of color who were all current or former officeholders in Prince William County, a suburban area outside the nation’s capital that constitutes the largest portion of the district.

The former Army officer gained a measure of fame when he and his twin brother, Alex, reported their concerns about Trump’s 2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which Trump sought an investigation of Biden and his son, Hunter.

Vindman highlighted his opposition to Trump in his campaign and in a victory statement issued Tuesday evening said, “our grass-roots movement is coming for the extreme MAGA agenda. Virginia voters are first and foremost values driven, and want to elect leaders with integrity who preserve fundamental rights and freedoms and not extremists.”

He faced criticism from some local officials who said he was unconnected to the region’s political dynamics.

In a battle between a former Army Green Beret and a former Navy SEAL, Republican voters chose the Army man, Anderson, over Navy veteran Cameron Hamilton.

Anderson and Hamilton were the top two fundraisers in a six-person field. Anderson drew support from House GOP leadership in Washington, while Hamilton had support from members of the House Freedom Caucus.

The district, which stretches from Prince William County south to Fredericksburg and west past Culpeper, tilts just slightly toward Democrats.

House District 10

Subramanyam defeated fellow Democratic candidates former Virginia House Speaker Eileen Filler-Corn, state Sens. Dan Helmer and Jennifer Boysko, and former Virginia Education Secretary Atif Qarni. Wexton endorsed Subramanyam.

Republican voters chose Clancy from a field of four candidates.

House District 2

In Virginia’s coastal 2nd Congressional District, Missy Cotter Smasal, a Navy veteran who runs a nonprofit that honors fallen servicewomen, defeated Jeremiah “Jake” Denton IV, a constitutional law and civil rights attorney, in the Democratic primary.

She’ll face Republican U.S. Rep. Jen Kiggans in November.

In a statement Tuesday evening, Smasal took aim at Kiggans and “the MAGA extremism she supports in Congress.”

“I will protect abortion rights and access for all and fight for resources for veterans and military families,” Smasal said. “I will always defend democracy and reject party extremism.”

U.S. Senate

In the Republican primary for U.S. Senate, Navy veteran Cao prevailed over his four opponents for a chance to try to unseat Kaine, a Democrat who is seeking his third term as the state’s junior U.S. senator.

Cao had the most money and previous campaign experience running for higher officer among the Republican primary contenders. He also had Trump’s endorsement.

In a victory post on Facebook, Cao immediately criticized President Joe Biden’s decision on Tuesday to allow certain U.S. citizens’ spouses without legal status to apply eventually for citizenship.

“Tomorrow, we begin our campaign to save the country that saved my life,” Cao stated. “I spent twenty-five years in the Navy, while Tim Kaine spent thirty years in elected office.”

Cao defeated Scott Parkinson, a former congressional staffer for DeSantis, as well as Jonathan Emord, an author and lawyer who often cites his court battles against the Food and Drug Administration. The other Republican candidates were Eddie Garcia, a U.S. Army veteran who owns a mobile app that serves veterans, and Chuck Smith, a former Navy Judge Advocate General’s Corps commander and an attorney.

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Finley contributed to this report from Norfolk.

The school board in Shenandoah County voted 5-1 last month to revert the name of Mountain View High School back to Stonewall Jackson High School, and that of Honey Run Elementary to Ashby Lee Elementary. The vote reversed a 2020 decision to remove the original names against a backdrop of nationwide protests over racial injustice.

The federal lawsuit states that Black students compose less than 3% of the school system’s population. Plaintiffs include five students — identified by their initials and described as Black, white and biracial — and their parents.

The Associated Press sent an email seeking comment to school board chair Dennis C. Barlow.

The NAACP wrote that students will be “required against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement.”

For example, the lawsuit said an incoming freshman, who is Black, would be forced to play sports as a member of the Stonewall Jackson “Generals.” And she would have to wear a uniform “adorned with a name and logo that symbolizes hatred, White supremacy, and Massive Resistance to integration.”

If the student doesn’t fully participate in school sports or other activities, she may miss out on future opportunities, including playing college sports, according to the lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District Court in Harrisonburg.

The NAACP alleges that the Confederate school names violate the students’ First Amendment rights, which include the right “not to express a view with which a person disagrees.” It also cites the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which “prohibits racial discrimination in state-supported institutions.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which maintains a database of more than 2,000 Confederate memorials nationwide, was not aware of another case of a school system restoring a Confederate name that was removed, senior research analyst Rivka Maizlish said in May.

Overall, the trend of removing Confederate names and memorials has continued, even if it has slowed somewhat since 2020, she said, noting that the Army renamed nine installations named for Confederate leaders, and removed a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

The school board members in Shenandoah County who had voted in May to restore the Confederate names said they were honoring popular community sentiment. They said the previous board members who had removed the names in 2020 had ignored constituents and due process on the matter.

Elections in 2023 significantly changed the school board’s makeup, with one board member writing in an op-ed for the Northern Virginia Daily that the results gave Shenandoah County “the first 100% conservative board since anyone can remember.”

That board member, Gloria Carlineo, said during a board meeting in May that opponents of the Confederate names should “stop bringing racism and prejudice into everything” because it “detracts from true cases of racism.”

The lone board member to vote against restoring the Confederate names, Kyle Gutshall, said he respected both sides of the debate but believed a majority of residents in his district wanted to leave the Mountain View and Honey Run names in place.

“I don’t judge anybody or look down on anybody for the decision they’re making,” he said. “It’s a complex issue.”

During several hours of public comment, county residents spoke up on both sides of the issue.

Beth Ogle, a parent and longtime resident, said restoring the Confederate names is “a statement to the world that you do not value the dignity and respect of your minority students, faculty and staff.”

Kenny Wakeman, a lifelong county resident, said the Stonewall Jackson name “stood proudly for 60 years until 2020,” when he said the “actions of a rogue police officer in Minneapolis, Minnesota,” prompted a move to change the name, a reference to the killing of George Floyd that sparked nationwide protests and debate over racial injustice.

Thomas J. “Stonewall” Jackson was a Confederate general from Virginia who gained fame at the First Battle of Bull Run near Manassas in 1861 and died in 1863 after he was shot and had his arm amputated. Jackson’s name was also removed from another high school in Virginia’s Prince William County in 2020. That school was renamed Unity Reed High School.

Ashby Lee is named for both Gen. Robert E. Lee, a Virginia native who commanded Confederate forces, and for Turner Ashby, a Confederate cavalry officer who was killed in battle in 1862 near Harrisonburg. A high school near Harrisonburg is also named for Ashby.

The resolution approved by the school board states that private donations would be used to pay for the name changes.

Shenandoah County, a largely rural jurisdiction with a population of about 45,000, roughly 100 miles west of Washington, D.C., has long been politically conservative. In 2020, Republican Donald Trump won 70% of the presidential vote in Shenandoah, even as Biden won Virginia by 10 points.

NORFOLK (AP) — Political observers have already placed bets on Tim Kaine, predicting the Democrat will glide into a third term as the junior U.S. Senator of Virginia, a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the upper chamber since 2002.

But Republicans vying for a chance to unseat the former vice presidential candidate say they see an opening with President Joe Biden at the top of November’s ticket. While Biden won Virginia by 10 percentage points in 2020, GOP primary candidates say the calculus has changed with heightened food prices, illegal border crossings and crime in American cities.

“The only person that was better off today than they were four years ago is an illegal alien,” Republican candidate Hung Cao, a 25-year Navy veteran who served in combat zones, told The Associated Press.

Cao has the most campaign money and past experience running for higher office in a general election among the five contenders in the primary on June 18. He also has the endorsement of former President Donald Trump, who stated that Cao would help stop inflation, secure the border and “defend our always under siege Second Amendment.”

Cao’s biography includes fleeing Vietnam with his family as a child in the 1970s. In a campaign video, he compares Vietnam’s communist regime during the Cold War to today’s Biden Administration.

“We are losing our country,” Cao says in the ad, which blames Biden for the criminal cases against Trump and shows footage of border crossings and store lootings. “You know it. But you also know that you can’t say it. We’re forced to say that wrong is right. We’re forced to lie.”

Cao told the AP that Kaine is a “rubber stamp” for Biden, while the GOP base is energized to end Kaine’s 30-year political career.

“If you want the nice guy up there, I’m not your guy,” Cao added. “If you want somebody to go in and kick some tail, I’m your guy that’s going to get this done.”

But whether Cao or anyone else in the primary can get it done is a big question. Political scientists say there’s a narrow path to victory for the GOP given Virginia’s moderate electorate, aversion to Trump in 2020 and Kaine’s salience with voters.

The most recent Republican from Virginia to hold a U.S. Senate seat was the late John Warner, a centrist with an independent streak who last won in 2002.

Kaine won his last race in 2018 by 16 percentage points. He has said he’s preparing for a tough race this year and noted that “Virginians will vote for Republicans in statewide elections,” as they did in 2021 for Gov. Glenn Youngkin.

“Nobody can take that for granted,” Kaine said when he announced his reelection bid.

Still, Kaine’s seat is listed as solidly Democratic by the nation’s three big political prognosticators: The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia.

“This is definitely an uphill climb for the Republican Party in this state, particularly with a candidate who could be more easily tied to Trump,” said Rebecca Bromley-Trujillo, a Christopher Newport University political science professor and research director of its Wason Center for Civic Leadership.

Besides Cao, the primary candidates include Scott Parkinson, a former congressional staffer for Ron DeSantis who now works for the conservative economic policy group Club for Growth. Jonathan Emord is an author and lawyer who often cites his experience successfully fighting the Food and Drug Administration in court.

Eddie Garcia is a U.S. Army veteran and former Army liaison in Congress who owns a mobile app that serves military veterans. Chuck Smith is a Marine veteran, former Navy JAG commander and an attorney.

Cao stands out for his Trump endorsement as well as his campaign war chest. As of March 31, he’s raised $2 million, more than double what any of his rival’s have, according to the Virginia Public Access Project.

Cao also made a decent showing in 2022 against Democratic U.S. Rep. Jennifer Wexton in blue-leaning northern Virginia. He lost the race by 6.5 percentage points in a district that Biden won two years earlier by 19 percentage points.

“I don’t have to win northern Virginia,” Cao said of his general election strategy. “I just need to move it the way I did.”

Cao has not escaped controversy. The Staunton News Leader reported that his Unleash America super PAC made zero campaign contributions to Republicans running for the statehouse in 2023, even though that was the PAC’s stated goal. It had raised about $100,000 in individual contributions.

Cao told the AP the story was “a hit job” and “there’s no there there.” He elaborated further to radio host John Fredericks, stating that the money had to go to start-up fees, lawyers and “compliance people.”

The News Leader reported that the PAC’s expenses included legal fees and money for digital fundraising, a communications firm and Cao’s campaign manager. Cao later told podcast host Alec Lace that he did nothing illegal and that the story was published by a “podunk local newspaper.”

The matter prompted attacks from some of Cao’s primary opponents and Democrats. But if Cao wins the primary, it will likely be a miniature scandal compared to the challenge of winning over moderate voters, said Bromley-Trujillo, the Christopher Newport University professor.

It’s a challenge all of the primary candidates would face, she said. They’ve run campaigns that are mostly to the right of Republican Gov. Youngkin’s successful race three years ago. And she doesn’t expect any to pivot toward the center after clamoring for Trump’s endorsement.

As a candidate in 2021, Youngkin did not disavow Trump but he kept him at a distance. Youngkin also focused on state and local issues, such as parents’ frustrations over pandemic school closures and pitching an end to the state’s grocery tax.

The governor’s race was the most recent opportunity for GOP candidates to win statewide office, with a Republican lieutenant governor and Attorney General scoring wins alongside Youngkin.

Youngkin, however, won by two percentage points. And J. Miles Coleman, associate editor of Sabato’s Crystal Ball, questions whether Youngkin would have succeeded if the race occurred after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the national right to an abortion in 2022.

“Virginia tends to be a little redder in those odd numbered years because maybe state issues are more the focus or Democratic enthusiasm might just be lower in those years,” Coleman said.

Still, in 2023, Democrats who campaigned on protecting abortion rights retook full control of Virginia’s General Assembly. It marked a sharp loss for Youngkin and his proposed 15-week abortion ban with exceptions for rape, incest and the life of the mother.

Meanwhile, Coleman said Kaine has a reputation as a dad-like figure who is pretty relatable. He’s won all of his statewide races, including as governor and technically as a vice presidential candidate in 2016, when he and Hillary Clinton carried the Commonwealth.

“Virginia is a blue state but it’s not California or Massachusetts,” Coleman added. “And once you get west of Charlottesville there is a lot of Republican turf. It’s usually pretty Democratic, but Republicans can win here if everything falls into place for them.”

NORFOLK, Va. (AP) — Memorial Day is supposed to be about mourning the nation’s fallen service members, but it’s come to anchor the unofficial start of summer and a long weekend of discounts on anything from mattresses to lawn mowers.

But for people such as Manuel Castañeda Jr., the day is very personal. He lost his father, a U.S. Marine who served in Vietnam, in an accident in 1966 in California while his father was training other Marines.

“It isn’t just the specials. It isn’t just the barbecue,” Castañeda told The Associated Press in a discussion about Memorial Day last year.

Castañeda also served in the Marines and Army National Guard, from which he knew men who died in combat. But he tries not to judge others who spend the holiday differently: “How can I expect them to understand the depth of what I feel when they haven’t experienced anything like that?”

1. WHY IS MEMORIAL DAY CELEBRATED?

It’s a day of reflection and remembrance of those who died while serving in the U.S. military, according to the Congressional Research Service. The holiday is observed in part by the National Moment of Remembrance, which encourages all Americans to pause at 3 p.m. for a moment of silence.

2. WHAT ARE THE ORIGINS OR MEMORIAL DAY?

The holiday stems from the American Civil War, which killed more than 600,000 service members — both Union and Confederate — between 1861 and 1865.

There’s little controversy over the first national observance of what was then called Decoration Day. It occurred May 30, 1868, after an organization of Union veterans called for decorating war graves with flowers, which were in bloom.

The practice was already widespread on a local level. Waterloo, New York, began a formal observance on May 5, 1866, and was later proclaimed to be the holiday’s birthplace.

Yet Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, traced its first observance to October 1864, according to the Library of Congress. And women in some Confederate states were decorating graves before the war’s end.

David Blight, a Yale history professor, points to May 1, 1865, when as many as 10,000 people, many of them Black, held a parade, heard speeches and dedicated the graves of Union dead in Charleston, South Carolina.

A total of 267 Union troops had died at a Confederate prison and were buried in a mass grave. After the war, members of Black churches buried them in individual graves.

“What happened in Charleston does have the right to claim to be first, if that matters,” Blight told The Associated Press in 2011.

In 2021, a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel cited the story in a Memorial Day speech in Hudson, Ohio. The ceremony’s organizers turned off his microphone because they said it wasn’t relevant to honoring the city’s veterans. The event’s organizers later resigned.

3. HAS MEMORIAL DAY ALWAYS BEEN A SOURCE OF CONTENTION?

Someone has always lamented the holiday’s drift from its original meaning.

As early as 1869, The New York Times wrote that the holiday could become “sacrilegious” and no longer “sacred” if it focuses more on pomp, dinners and oratory.

In 1871, abolitionist Frederick Douglass feared Americans were forgetting the Civil War’s impetus — enslavement — when he gave a Decoration Day speech at Arlington National Cemetery.

“We must never forget that the loyal soldiers who rest beneath this sod flung themselves between the nation and the nation’s destroyers,” Douglass said.

His concerns were well-founded, said Ben Railton, a professor of English and American studies at Fitchburg State University in Massachusetts. Even though roughly 180,000 Black men served in the Union Army, the holiday in many communities would essentially become “white Memorial Day,” especially after the rise of the Jim Crow South, Railton told the AP in 2023.

Meanwhile, how the day was spent — at least by the nation’s elected officials — could draw scrutiny for years after the Civil War. In the 1880s, then-President Grover Cleveland was said to have gone fishing — and “people were appalled,” Matthew Dennis, an emeritus history professor at the University of Oregon, told the AP last year.

By 1911, the Indianapolis 500 held its inaugural race on May 30, drawing 85,000 spectators. A report from The Associated Press made no mention of the holiday — or any controversy.

4. HOW HAS MEMORIAL DAY CHANGED?

Dennis said Memorial Day’s potency diminished somewhat with the addition of Armistice Day, which marked World War I’s end on Nov. 11, 1918. Armistice Day became a national holiday by 1938 and was renamed Veterans Day in 1954.

An act of Congress changed Memorial Day from every May 30th to the last Monday in May in 1971. Dennis said the creation of the three-day weekend recognized that Memorial Day had long been transformed into a more generic remembrance of the dead, as well as a day of leisure.

In 1972, Time Magazine said the holiday had become “a three-day nationwide hootenanny that seems to have lost much of its original purpose.”

5. WHY IS MEMORIAL DAY TIED TO SALES AND TRAVEL?

Even in the 19th century, grave ceremonies were followed by leisure activities such as picnicking and foot races, Dennis said.

The holiday also evolved alongside baseball and the automobile, the five-day work week and summer vacation, according to the 2002 book “A History of Memorial Day: Unity, Discord and the Pursuit of Happiness.”

In the mid-20th century, a small number of businesses began to open defiantly on the holiday.

Once the holiday moved to Monday, “the traditional barriers against doing business began to crumble,” authors Richard Harmond and Thomas Curran wrote.

These days, Memorial Day sales and traveling are deeply woven into the nation’s muscle memory.

Jason Redman, a retired Navy SEAL who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, told the AP last year that he honors the friends he’s lost. Thirty names are tattooed on his arm “for every guy that I personally knew that died.”

He wants Americans to remember the fallen — but also to enjoy themselves, knowing lives were sacrificed to forge the holiday.

The grim risks came into stark relief Monday when four law enforcement officers were killed in North Carolina while serving an arrest warrant. The attack in Charlotte left four other officers wounded and became the worst attack on police in the U.S. since 2016.

The tragedy underscores the limits of even the best-trained officers and the unpredictability of the alleged criminals being served.

“A lot of these guys don’t want to go back to jail,” said Tre Pennie, executive director of the National Fallen Officer Foundation. “And if it’s not a surprise, they got time to prepare. They’re going to do everything they can to keep from going back to jail.”

Law enforcement can never control more than half of the situation, said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association.

“They can be 100% correct in everything they do,” he said, but the “suspect and or suspects are responsible for the other 50%.”

Here is what we know about the shooting in Charlotte and other fatal shootings of officers serving warrants.

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What happened in Charlotte?

A U.S. Marshals Task Force of officers from different agencies arrived in a residential neighborhood to try to capture Terry Clark Hughes Jr., authorities said. He was wanted for possession of a firearm by an ex-felon and fleeing to elude in Lincoln County, North Carolina.

The task force was fired on as they approached the house, and Hughes, 39, was killed in the front yard, authorities said.

An AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a 40-caliber handgun were found at the scene. An AR-15 is able to penetrate traditional body armor and allowed the shooter to “unload several rounds towards our officers within a matter of seconds,” Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Chief Johnny Jennings said.

He said more than 100 spent bullets were recovered, though it wasn’t clear how many were fired by the suspect. At least 12 officers also fired guns.

Authorities in Charlotte will likely conduct an “after-event analysis” that will include interviewing officers and neighbors, said Alexis Piquero, a University of Miami criminology professor.

The lessons learned will be of interest to law enforcement agencies across the country, he said, to make sure officers “can prevent this from ever happening again.”

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How often are officers killed?

Piquero, who is a former director of the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, said the serving of warrants by police often occurs as planned and runs “fairly smoothly.”

And while officers prepare for danger, shootings are unavoidable because officers can’t predict how a suspect will react. All it takes is “a high-caliber weapon (and a) person with really evil intentions,” he said.

Three officers were killed while serving warrants in 2022, according to the FBI’s Center for the Study of Law Enforcement Officers Killed and Assaulted.

Their deaths amounted to 5% of the 60 law enforcement officials who died that year because of felonious incidents. Those are defined by the FBI as deaths that are the “direct result of a willful and intentional act by an offender.”

In 2021 and 2020, two officers died each year while serving an arrest warrant, FBI data shows. Five officers died in 2019 while serving search or arrest warrants.

Recent fatal shootings include the killing of two sheriff’s deputies in Cobb County, Georgia, in 2022. They were attempting to arrest a man wanted on theft charges when another man confronted them with a gun, authorities said. A shootout ensued when the armed man refused commands to drop his weapon.

In 2021, a Houston police officer was killed and another was wounded while they were attempting to arrest a man on drug charges, police said. The man they were trying to arrest was also killed.

In 2020, a Philadelphia police officer was shot and killed as he served a homicide warrant at a home, officials said. Several people were arrested, including the fugitive being sought.

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How do police try to lessen the risks?

Eells, of the National Tactical Officers Association, said police must consider a multitude of factors before serving a warrant.

“There are so many tangibles that come to play. It’s like trying to wrap your arms around Jell-O and then pick it up,” he said. “It’s not easy.”

Among the things officers will want to know is the criminal histories of the people being arrested.

“Have they demonstrated a propensity for violence? Have they been known to carry weapons?” said Eells, who served more than 30 years with the Colorado Springs Police Department. “Are they involved in gang activity?”

Mental illness as well as drug and alcohol abuse are also valuable details. So is any formal weapons training or known access to body armor.

Then there’s the suspect’s location. Do police have to go through a fence? Is there a ring camera? Is it an apartment complex with a lot of people around? Maybe it’s safer to arrest the suspect away from home.

“They’ll go through this planning process until they arrive at a decision where they think they’ve mitigated the factors that they can control with regard to risk,” Eells said. “But there will still always be inherent risk. We cannot eliminate it.”

It all depends on factors that are still mostly unknown. They range from the design of the new bridge to how swiftly government officials can navigate the bureaucracy of approving permits and awarding contracts.

Realistically, the project could take five to seven years, according to Ben Schafer, an engineering professor at Johns Hopkins University.

“The lead time on air conditioning equipment right now for a home renovation is like 16 months, right?” Schafer said. He continued: “So it’s like you’re telling me they’re going to build a whole bridge in two years? I want it to be true, but I think empirically it doesn’t feel right to me.”

Others are more optimistic about the potential timeline: Sameh Badie, an engineering professor at George Washington University, said the project could take as little as 18 months to two years.

The Key Bridge collapsed Tuesday, killing six members of a crew that was working on the span, after the Dali cargo ship plowed into one its supports. Officials are scrambling to clean up and rebuild after the accident, which has shuttered the city’s busy port and a portion of the Baltimore beltway.

The disaster is in some ways similar to the deadly collapse of Florida’s Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which was was struck by a freighter in Tampa Bay in 1980. The new bridge took five years to build, was 19 months late and ran $20 million over budget when it opened in 1987.

But experts say it’s better to look to more recent bridge disasters for a sense of how quickly reconstruction may happen.

Jim Tymon, executive director of the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials, cited the case of the Interstate 35W bridge in Minnesota, which collapsed into the Mississippi River in 2007. The new span was up in less than 14 months.

“It’s the best comparison that we have for a project like this,” Tymon said. “They did outstanding work in being able to get the approvals necessary to be able to rebuild that as quickly as possible.”

Tymon expects various government agencies to work together to push through permits, environmental and otherwise.

“It doesn’t mean that all of the right boxes won’t get checked — they will,” Tymon said. “It’ll just be done more efficiently because everybody will know that this has to get done as quickly as possible.”

One looming issue is the source of funding. President Joe Biden has repeatedly said the federal government will pay for the new bridge, but that remains to be seen.

“Hopefully, Congress will be able to come together to provide those resources as soon as possible so that that does not become a source of delay,” Tymon said.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar helped to obtain funding quickly to rebuild the I-35W bridge in her state. But she said replacing the Baltimore span could be more complicated.

She noted that the I-35W bridge, a federal interstate highway, was a much busier roadway with about 140,000 vehicle crossings a day, compared with about 31,000 for the Maryland bridge.

“But where there’s a will there’s a way, and you can get the emergency funding,” Klobuchar said. “It’s happened all over the country when disasters hit. And the fact that this is such a major port also makes it deserving of making sure that this all gets taken care of.”

Badie, of George Washington University, said the cost could be between $500 million and $1 billion, with the largest variable being the design.

For example a suspension bridge like San Francisco’s Golden Gate will cost more, while a cable-stayed span, like Florida’s Skyway Sunshine Bridge, which handles weight using cables and towers, would be less expensive.

Whatever is built, steel is expensive these days and there is a backlog for I-beams, Badie said. Plus, the limited number of construction companies that can tackle such a project are already busy on other jobs.

“A project like this is going to be expedited, so everything is going to cost a lot more,” Badie said.

Hota GangaRao, a West Virginia University engineering professor, said the project could cost as little as $400 million. But that’s only if the old bridge’s pier foundations are used; designers may want to locate the new supports farther away from the shipping channels to avoid another collision.

“That’s going to be more steel, more complicated construction and more checks and balances,” GangaRao said. “It all adds up.”

Norma Jean Mattei, an emeritus engineering professor at The University of New Orleans, said replacing the Key Bridge likely will take several years. Even if it’s a priority, the process of designing the span, getting permits and hiring contractors takes a lot of time. And then you have to build it.

“It’s quite a process to actually get a bridge of this type into operation,” she said.

Democrats, who have rejected Youngkin’s call to start immediate negotiations with him over their points of disagreement, instead urged him to reconsider his opposition to their proposals. The Democratic-led General Assembly passed the two-year spending plan earlier this month with some Republican support and will next meet in Richmond for a one-day session in April.

“The governor simply needs to sign the budget and stop threatening an unprecedented budget veto. We have done our job. It is now time for him to do his,” Sen. Mamie Locke of Hampton said at the event Monday morning in a Portsmouth storefront, where she and other lawmakers squeezed into a small space before news cameras.

Lawmakers also struck a pessimistic tone on the path forward for a proposed pro-sports arena in northern Virginia and offered a sharp rebuke of Youngkin’s general approach to working with the Assembly.

“He is not very smart when it comes to politics. He thinks that he is the boss of all of us,” said Sen. L. Louise Lucas of Portsmouth, who leads the Senate’s budget writing committee. Lucas has used the power of that role to block standalone legislation related to the Alexandria arena deal and keep it out of the budget bill.

Youngkin has been holding public appearances around the state to object to the budget that passed. He has criticized its inclusion of what his administration says are $2.6 billion in tax hikes in the form of an expansion of the sales tax to cover digital goods and a push to renew Virginia’s participation in a carbon cap-and-trade plan. He’s said he hopes to avoid vetoing the bill, which would give pay raises to teachers and public workers and boost public education spending. But he has also said unequivocally that he won’t sign a budget that raises taxes.

When the lawmakers were asked whether they were willing to move on from the proposed digital sales tax, they reiterated that Youngkin himself had first raised the idea — though he also coupled it with a proposed cut to the income tax rate that would result in overall cuts.

Youngkin recently floated an unusual path forward, saying lawmakers should sit down with him now, ahead of the April 17 reconvened session when they will meet in Richmond to consider his proposed amendments to legislation, including the budget, which would kick in July 1. The governor suggested if they reached a compromise, he could submit it through amendments for a vote then.

In a letter to Youngkin last week, legislators rejected that proposal. In an interview, Senate Majority Leader Scott Surovell — who was traveling and did not join in Monday’s event — said that with that suggestion, Youngkin was trying “expand his role and power in the process by demanding a negotiation.”

Youngkin told reporters Monday at an unrelated bill signing he would “continue to reach out and see if we can find a way to land this budget.”

Aubrey Layne, who served as secretary of finance under previous Democratic Gov. Ralph Northam and also advised Youngkin early in his administration, cautioned in an interview Monday that any heated rhetoric around the subject of the budget could eventually have negative implications for the state’s prized AAA credit rating.

“Governance is a big part of our AAA credit rating, and negative public comments, whether it be about economic development deals or the budget does not help the credibility of the commonwealth,” he said.

Lawmakers also had critical or noncommital remarks when asked about Youngkin’s proposed $2 billion development district with a new arena intended to lure the NBA’s Washington Wizards and the NHL’s Washington Capitals to Alexandria.

House Speaker Don Scott joked that he needed to leave when the question came up.

Lucas, who’s been a leading critic of the plan, insisted that it’s dead, as she’s said before.

“At this point … if the conversation is going to continue to be, ‘We have to use taxpayer-financed debt, and it’s going to be in Alexandria,’ the conversation’s a complete waste of time,” Surovell said.

Youngkin continued to insist “there is a way forward” though he voiced concern about potentially losing the teams to the District of Columbia, which has offered $500 million to revamp the facility where the teams currently play, or to Maryland.

“It’s our opportunity to take, and I would encourage us to take it. And I’m hopeful that we can, although the clock is ticking and we need to get some work done,” he said.

Legislators will continue their “Virginia Families First” press tour around the state this week with stops in Richmond, northern Virginia and southwest Virginia.

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Finley reported from Portsmouth.