The Birmingham Belles celebrate the Old South in hoop skirts. Some former Belles say it’s time to stop.

When each 17-year-old Belle is presented at the Arlington Historic House, gliding down the steps of the Greek Revival-style mansion, an announcer proclaims the names of her parents and extols her academic accomplishments and social involvements.

But to the horror of some previous participants, some former Belles are denouncing the organization as overtly racist and out of step with the times. As the nation grapples with issues of racial justice and a history of oppression, these repentant Belles say it’s time to stop honoring customs and social mores from an era in which millions of Americans lived in bondage.

The factious debate, prompted by the killing of George Floyd while in the custody of Minneapolis police, illustrates how that death has stirred a racial awakening for many White Americans.

“It would be the same thing if I grew up in a community that had a debutante ball that reenacted the Holocaust,” said Emily Owen Mendelsohn, 23, a former Belle who recently started a petition to end the organization. “It’s almost blasphemous. And it’s happened for so long that people don’t even see it as being harmful.”

The Belles’s supporters say the event is a celebration of the area’s cultural history, of deserving young women and of service to the community. “I don’t think the Belles should be done away with,” said Marian Loftis, who was a Belle in 1991. “When is it going to stop? Do we remove history out of the history books because it’s offensive or it hurts?”

The social media blowback to Mendelsohn’s petition was swift. A commenter on a Facebook post accused her of “complaining and causing racial hatred,” while another said “white people better fight back or you will loose your country to a bunch of stupid troublemakers.”

Amid the comments calling Mendelsohn and allies “crybabies” and “bedwetters” are testimonials from other former Belles who regret their involvement — many who say the notion that the Birmingham Belles was racially problematic never occurred to them until they saw it within the context of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Part of the debate about the Belles centers on the site of its annual social event, Arlington Historic House, where 14 enslaved people toiled, according to the 1860 Census, living in two “slave houses” on the property. In the 195os, the city bought the estate after a coalition of Birmingham residents raised half the purchase price.

For decades, it operated under the name “the Arlington Shrine” or “the Arlington Confederate Shrine” and hosted historical pageants and a fair.

Now the Birmingham Belles will need to find a new site. In response to questions from The Washington Post, Toby Richards, director of the Arlington Historic House, said in an email that the house’s board of directors in January asked the Belles not to wear their Old South attire to the house. The house has been closed since March because of the coronavirus, and the group did not hold its annual spring event there. In an email to The Post, the Birmingham Belles said it would seek a new venue.

Barry McNealy, education consultant for the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, an affiliate of the Smithsonian Institution, grew up near the plantation home and toured Arlington Historic House as an elementary school student.

McNealy doesn’t mince words about romanticizing the Old South. “When you get down to brass tacks, it’s about white supremacy,” he said. “If we can’t have that moment of clarity as a society, we’re going to continue to have little girls dress up in hoop skirts and twirl around and believe they’re doing something laudable.”

Autumn Robinson, 23, said she grew up as a “token Black girl” in Mountain Brook, Birmingham’s most affluent suburb and the epicenter of the Belles. “I truly learned to assimilate,” she said.

The Birmingham Belles, which gave its first presentation in 1969, is invitation-only, and about 120 girls are inducted a year. Legacies are always included, but Robinson and Aleeyah Gibbons, among the only three Black students in their graduating class of 340 students in 2015 at Mountain Brook High, were not invited. Former Belles interviewed for this article don’t recall a Black student being included.

Soon after Floyd’s death in May, Robinson challenged her former classmate Mendelsohn about the legacy of the Belles. “I just think if we’re tearing down monuments [the Belles] should probably get booted too,” Robinson told Mendelsohn over Facebook Messenger.

Mendelsohn was horrified to reexamine her participation in the tradition, monogrammed pantalets and all.

“I didn’t really get how problematic my hometown was until I went to college,” she explained. “Glorifying the antebellum South, waving Confederate flags and saying the n-word are steppingstones to a knee on a Black man’s neck,” she said. “If we are not fighting this, then we are complicit to murder.”

Mendelsohn braced herself and started a Change.org petition to end the Birmingham Belles. It has since garnered more than 1,600 signatures of support.

Former Belle Laura Middlebrook, 25, signed the petition. “I am doing my best to study anti-racism and allyship,” Middlebrook said. “While it was fun to dress up, I wasn’t thinking about what it meant to be there. I don’t condone this anymore.”

The Belles’s leadership, which has an email account but operates anonymously, issued a statement announcing it is “committed to reevaluating the way in which our honorees are presented.” The Belles did not respond to questions from The Post about what form changes might take.

The Post reached out to more than a dozen former Belle organizers, former Belles and their family members, some of whom had defended the group on Facebook. Three declined to comment, and the others did not respond to phone calls or social media messages.

“Right now, many people in our community feel frustration towards some of our nation’s many historical organizations,” the Belles’s statement reads. “We believe that philanthropic organizations should be judged not based on their origins long ago, but on their contributions to the community today.”

The Birmingham Belles logs more than 1,200 service hours a year, according to the group’s leadership. With roughly 120 Belles inducted each spring, that’s about 10 hours of volunteer work each. Belles can fulfill that requirement by marching in parades in their hoop skirts, staffing summer luncheons at Arlington and baking cookies using Belle recipes.

Loftis, the 1991 Belle, also sees calls to disband the Belles as an issue of revisionist history, in line with the removal of Confederate monuments.

“I think it’s sad that a petition like that exists,” she said. “I feel like anything that has to do with the Civil War era, anything below the Mason-Dixon Line is being brutally chastised for so much that went on back in the day.”

Loftis remembers her time as a Belle fondly; her blue-collar family had worked hard to send her to a private Christian school within Mountain Brook’s social orbit, and being chosen as a Belle symbolized the opportunities their sacrifice afforded her. Being selected as a Belle was seen as a high honor and a testament to a young woman’s character. To this day, many Belles include it on their college applications.

“Never once did it bring in any semblance of glorifying slavery,” Loftis said. “Had it done that, I don’t think it would have lasted this long, because that’s not the South I know. That’s not the town I know.”

Gretchen Steele, 23, began to have misgivings soon after her time as a Belle.

During her presentation, Steele said, she was swept up by the exclusivity of the Belles and the perceived honor of being selected. “I was really taken by the idea of floating around a beautiful landscape and having people look at me,” Steele said.

But when Steele attended the next year’s initiation, “watching it from a slight distance” made her realize how strange the organization’s premise was, she said. “I started to do some Googling and researching and found some things that I really wished that I hadn’t allowed myself to affiliate with.”

Steele looked to the heart of the Belles — the Arlington Historic House — for answers. Today, Arlington is a “house museum” with the stated goal of educating visitors on Birmingham’s history and culture. But there are holes in the history Arlington tells.

Long before Steele was presented at the Arlington Historic House when she was 17, another 17-year-old girl lived on the property. The 1860 Slave Schedules, a count of enslaved people as part of the census, shows 14 people listed as the property of Judge William S. Mudd, then the owner of Arlington. Among them was a 17-year-old Black female owned by Mudd. Neither she nor her parents were named.

Richards, director of the house, said that Arlington’s board was working to rewrite the brochure to include information about slavery but had been slowed by the coronavirus. A committee will present updated information to the board on Wednesday, she said.

In fiscal 2020, the city of Birmingham allocated $725,764 for the maintenance and operation of Arlington Historic House. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, charged with telling the stories of 16th Street Baptist Church, Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” and fire hoses and police dogs, was budgeted to receive $1 million.

Arlington is also used as an event venue — hosting weddings, luncheons, board meetings and murder-mystery dinners. The plantation house, the city’s website promises, can transport a wedding party to the “golden days of past elegance.”

In 1978, McNealy, now with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, was an 8-year-old Black boy who lived on Cotton Avenue, less than 1,000 feet down the road from the Arlington Historic House.

He remembers being taken to Arlington as a third-grader on a class trip. “We had these really nice, sweet people talking to us about life in the house and the ceilings and all that stuff,” McNealy said. “And I clearly remember the word ‘servant’ being used over and over again.”

McNealy sees reason for hope in allies like the repentant Belles. A new generation of young people doesn’t know Birmingham’s history, he said, and will “recoil” from wrongheaded traditions once they learn the truth.

“It’s okay for Arlington to be there because it existed and you cannot erase history,” McNealy said.

“But you also cannot select history. Because when you start selecting history, you go back to my mom’s admonition, that half a truth is a whole lie,” he said. “And if you are lying, you defeat the whole purpose of studying history in the first place.”