Lawmakers Leverage Defense Bill To Address Police Reform, Racial Injustice

Maryland Democratic Rep. Anthony Brown is African American, and as an Army combat veteran he knows first hand about the military's tributes to the Confederacy.

Brown served at four of the 10 Army installations named for Confederate officers.

"I went to flight school at Fort Rucker. I learned to jump out of airplanes at Fort Benning. I deployed to Iraq from Fort Bragg," the House Democrat says, respectively, of the bases in Alabama, Georgia and North Carolina. He also spent time at Fort Hood in Texas.

Now, Brown is leading the charge in the House to rename those installations. This month, a House panel adopted his bipartisan measure, which also looks to remove other Confederate tributes from the military, in the defense bill.

"I grew up not knowing about the savagery of slavery," Brown, a member of the , said while introducing