US military academies’ aim of equality rings hollow for graduates of color

Despite anti-discrimination policies ex-cadets say racism is rife in institutions that still honor Confederate generals

Eight years after he graduated from the US Military Academy at West Point, New York, Geoffrey Easterling remains astonished by the Confederate history still memorialized on the storied academy's campus - the six-foot-tall painting of the Confederate general Robert E Lee in the library, the barracks dormitory named for Lee and the Lee Gate on Lee Road.

As a black student at the army academy, he remembers feeling devastated" when a classmate pointed out the enslaved person also depicted in the life-size Lee painting.