When Grammy-award-winning country band Lady Antebellum first convened in 2006, their name was inspired by the antebellum style mansion in a promo photo. When they decided to change the name, they failed to first count the cost surrounding their first choice, thus defeating the purpose of the name change in the first place.

In June of 2020, during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests in reaction to the unjust police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, the members of Lady Antebellum released an emotional statement on their social media accounts. It said that their eyes were opened to the struggle of African-Americans, and in response to the controversy surrounding its connotations of slavery, they would be removing the word “Antebellum” from their name (which describes the period before the Civil War) and going by “Lady A.”

Unfortunately, the name Lady A was already in use by a blues singer out of Seattle, a Black woman named Anita White. After being alerted to this reality, the country band announced a few days later that they’d had a teleconference and agreed to share the name. They even made tentative plans to collaborate on a song. Those plans were scuttled, however, once White’s attorney requested a sizable sum of money in exchange for their de facto name-takeover. In response, the country band decided to file suit against White in a bid to get a judge to allow them to share the name Lady A.

In short, in order to demonstrate that Black Lives Matter, they sued a Black woman. As of publication, the court case is still pending. However, the suit has been widely criticized on social media, or as it’s known by its other name, the court of public opinion.

Possible Preaching Angle:

What if, instead of changing the name, the band leaned into its meaning? What if they sought to work toward undoing the legacy of slavery from generations prior? However, they reacted in a hypocritical way, working against the very cause they claimed to support.