The Week in Confederate Heritage

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In this week’s report on the national retreat of confederate heritage, we start with this op-ed piece from Dallas, Texas.


The Confederate Memorial is pictured at Pioneer Park in downtown Dallas, Tuesday, July 18, 2017. Dallas is looking at the history of its Confederate monuments and considering whether they should be removed, relocated or contextualized in some way. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News)(Tom Fox / Staff Photographer)

It says, “If someone is supposedly a hero fighting for a cause, then the cause that person fought for must have been heroic as well. A monument to a movement or nation or event inherently defines that movement, nation, or event as being glorious. Monuments monumentally endorse a set of values. This effort to shape the public’s understanding of the past is a method of shaping the values of the present. And every Confederate monument standing today loudly proclaims that, whatever might be said about civil rights and racial equality in contemporary political discourse, the enduring values of this place, this city, and this people is white supremacy. As Kathryn Allamong Jacob masterfully explains in her book, Testament to Union: Civil War Monuments in Washington, D.C.: ‘Mundane as they may appear, ubiquitous as they may be, public monuments constitute serious cultural authority. They are important precisely because, by their mere presence and their obvious expense, they impose a memory of an event or individual on the public landscape that orders our lives.’ Monuments in public spaces represent what the city, county, state or nation seeks to represent as its core beliefs. They shape identity, and shaping identities and influencing values is a strategy to influence, if not control, the future. Discussion of Confederate monuments has focused on what offense they might give to African-Americans, but the discussion fails to acknowledge that others are also poisoned with this message of white supremacy. It is not surprising that white nationalist Richard Spencer grew up in Dallas and marches in defense of Confederate monuments, for he grew up in the shadow of such edifices. Every Confederate monument proclaims that African-American lives, their suffering, and the crimes committed against them really don’t matter. For if African-American lives mattered these monuments would be gone. These monuments instruct the public, including judges, police officers and jurors that fair treatment under the law for African-Americans represents an avoidable inconvenience. The plaque at the Lew Sterrett Justice Center honoring Robert E. Lee in the hallway to the Dallas County Central Jury Room instructs those jurors that African-American freedom is expendable. These monuments also instruct African-American youth that, despite all the claims made in schools, their hopes and dreams are not treasured by society. British journalist of Barbadian descent, Gary Younge, in his book, No Place Like Home: A Black Briton’s Journey Through the American South, describes his feelings while walking amidst a series of 100-year-old statues depicting Confederate leaders on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia: ‘I turned around to walk back up Monument Avenue, feeling angry and confused … I had spent about an hour walking along a road in which four men who fought to enslave me … have been honoured and exalted. I resented the fact that on the way to work every day, black people have to look at that. Imagine how black children must feel when they learn that the people who have been raised and praised up the road are the same ones who tried to keep their great-great-grandparents in chains.’ Confederate monuments are an ongoing source of alienation. We should not be surprised that when alienation is taught in schools, in political debates, and in public spaces that young people receive the message and become alienated themselves. This city has a massive Confederate War Memorial near the Dallas Convention Center. This work features statues of Confederate generals Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and Albert Sidney Johnston, as well as the Confederacy’s only president, Jefferson Davis. The figures surround a statue of a Confederate soldier atop a 60-foot pillar. One inscription on the monument pays tribute to ‘the genius and valor of Confederate seamen.’ We have a Robert E. Lee Park in Oak Lawn that features an equestrian statue of the commander of the Army of Northern Virginia near a replica of a slavery-era plantation home. Multiple sculptures referencing the Confederacy and the Great Seal of the Confederate States of America can be found at Fair Park. A Confederate flag hangs at Fair Park’s Great Hall, which also includes a massive medallion on one wall incorporating a female figure representing the Confederacy. A mural featuring portraits of Confederate generals John Bell Hood, Albert Sidney Johnston and Dick Dowling adorns another wall. Although the name of Robert E. Lee Elementary School will be changed, there are numerous other Dallas schools named after prominent Confederate military officers and political leaders: William Cabell, William H. Gaston, John Ireland, Sidney Lanier, Stonewall Jackson, Albert Sidney Johnston, John H. Reagan and Oran M. Roberts. Some of the people honored have no direct relationship to Dallas history; while some figured prominently in the city’s past, but all willingly, and often enthusiastically, participated in a treasonous war fought to preserve chattel slavery, that caused the deaths of 750,000 Americans and the maiming of tens of thousands more, and attempted to tear the nation asunder. The time has come for these tributes to the Confederacy to come down and for public buildings that bear the names of those whose fame is primarily tied to their service to a slave republic to assume a new identity. These monuments have stood mostly unchallenged for decades because the American history textbooks used in public schools are in themselves largely, metaphorically, Confederate monuments, which obscure, if not erase history, diminish the value of African American lives, and train generations of Americans to not comprehend the horrors of human bondage as practiced in the United States.”


The Confederate Memorial in Greenwood Cemetery in Dallas is across Central Expressway from City Place in Uptown. Photographed Wednesday, August 2, 2017. (Guy Reynolds/The Dallas Morning News)(Guy Reynolds)

The two writers continue, “Most loathsome of Dallas’s monuments, and perhaps singularly loathsome of Confederate monuments everywhere is the one-third replica of Robert E. Lee’s plantation home, Arlington House, in Lee Park. Weddings frequently take place there. Plantations were sites of the rape, beating, and torture of slaves. The faux plantation features a portrait of Robert E. Lee, a white supremacist who fought for slavery and white supremacy. The participants in such weddings demonstrate by their actions that they consider the horrors of slavery a triviality. They befoul their marriages and bequeath to any heirs a legacy of racial callousness and indifference to evil. The Robert E. Lee so elaborately honored at Lee Park and elsewhere in Dallas was a harsh slave master. Wesley Norris, who suffered the misfortune of being owned by Lee, recounted that he endured a beating after he attempted to escape in 1859. When Norris was captured, Lee said he would teach Norris ‘a lesson he would never forget.’ Norris offered the following account of what happened next: ‘He then ordered us to the barn, where, in his presence, we were tied firmly to posts by a Mr. Gwin, our overseer, who was ordered by Gen. Lee to strip us to the waist and give us fifty lashes each, excepting my sister, who received but twenty; we were accordingly stripped to the skin by the overseer, who, however, had sufficient humanity to decline whipping us; accordingly Dick Williams, a county constable, was called in, who gave us the number of lashes ordered; Gen. Lee, in the meantime, stood by, and frequently enjoined Williams to lay it on well, an injunction which he did not fail to heed; not satisfied with simply lacerating our naked flesh, Gen. Lee then ordered the overseer to thoroughly wash our backs with brine, which was done.’ During the Civil War Lee stated that slavery represented the most appropriate relationship between whites and African-Americans since African-Americans were an inferior race. After the Civil War, Lee campaigned against granting African-Americans civil rights. He stated in testimony to the Reconstruction Committee of Congress that Virginia would be better off if it got rid of African-Americans. This is the man families honor when they hold weddings at Lee Park at the replica of Arlington House. Consciously or not, they celebrate their marriage by paying tribute to the slave past. For this reason, the clergy should not agree to perform weddings at Arlington House. Whatever the resolutions, position papers or published policies of denominations might be regarding race, whatever fine phrases these proclamations might say, religious leaders of prominent churches, temples and other places of worship who perform marriages at the Arlington House replica in Dallas will be complicit in a Robert E. Lee plantation wedding. Organizations that meet at the replica plantation house show contempt for African-Americans as well. When the owners of properties like The Claridge, 21 Turtle Creek, 3525 Turtle Creek, The Mayfair, The Vendôme and The Wyndemere take part in lighting up Lee Park, we see how the upper classes of Dallas embrace a duplicate Robert E. Lee plantation and adorn it to celebrate the birth of Christ. What does it say about the Dallas Christian community that this doesn’t raise a cry of disgust?”


Published August 30, 1962 – Rebel relatives rededicated the Confederate Monument Sunday in Pioneer Cemetery – a graveyard where the markers read like Dallas street signs. (JOE LAIRD – staff photographer / DMN file photo)

In ending the piece, the authors say, “These monuments glorify violent insurrectionists who sought to tear the United States of America apart. The implied endorsement of the Confederate cause is toxic to today’s politics. Multiple polls, both national and statewide, have shown disturbingly high percentages of the Texas public supporting secession. In May 2016, the Texas state Republican Party platform committee at their convention in Dallas astonishingly voted down a secession resolution by only 16 to 14 with one abstention. It might be thought that such a resolution would not get a single vote or even be presented for a vote by a mainstream political organization. This past June, participants in the Texas Boys State government education program sponsored by the American Legion, during an exercise in which they portrayed members of the state Legislature, voted for the secession of Texas from the United States. The tributes to the Confederacy that pockmark the landscape are teaching the state’s next generation of leaders that treason is an honorable political option. Sadly, Americans today need to be reminded why secession took place in 1861. The purpose of the Confederacy was clearly to preserve white dictatorship. Confederate Vice-President Alexander H. Stephens made this clear in his infamous ‘Cornerstone Speech’ on March 21, 1861, when he said that the Confederate nation that he and the other leaders of the secession movement hoped to establish rested ‘upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical and moral truth.’ In the ‘Declaration of Causes Which Impel Texas to Secede from the Federal Union,’ Feb. 2, 1861, of the Texas secession convention, repeatedly cited slavery as the reason for leaving the Union: ‘In all the non-slave-holding States, in violation of that good faith and comity which should exist between entirely distinct nations, the people have formed themselves into a great sectional party, now strong enough in numbers to control the affairs of each of those States, based upon the unnatural feeling of hostility to these Southern States and their beneficent and patriarchal system of African slavery, proclaiming the debasing doctrine of the equality of all men, irrespective of race or color — a doctrine at war with nature, in opposition to the experience of mankind, and in violation of the plainest revelations of the Divine Law. They demand the abolition of negro slavery throughout the confederacy, the recognition of political equality between the white and the negro races, and avow their determination to press on their crusade against us, so long as a negro slave remains in these States … That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.’ To its shame, Dallas still honors the Confederacy, its institution of slavery and Confederate leaders. It is time for these memorials to come down. Some will argue that the Confederate monuments are ‘history.’ There is a fundamental difference, however, between history and propaganda. History does not have as its primary object glamorization. History is about analysis, context and explanation of the origins of ideas, institutions and events. Confederate memorials do none of these things.”

According to this article, “Slavery reparations are back in the national spotlight. A House Judiciary subcommittee held a hearing this week to discuss establishing a federal commission that would explore how the US government might compensate the descendants of enslaved Americans. And though the White House press secretary declined to say whether President Joe Biden would sign legislation to develop reparations for slavery, she did say he supported a study on the matter. Lawmakers have been advocating for a federal effort to study slavery reparations for more than 30 years now — to no avail. But since the widespread protests last year against racial injustice and the inequalities laid bare by the Covid-19 pandemic, the debate has taken on a new urgency. ‘At the very root of the word reparation is the word repair,’ Dreisen Heath, researcher and advocate for Human Rights Watch who testified at Wednesday’s hearing, told CNN. ‘And the necessary process of repair is the only way we get to actually achieving racial justice.’ So, just how would reparations, focused specifically on slavery, work? The idea of giving Black people reparations for slavery dates back to right after the end of the Civil War (think 40 acres and a mule). But for decades, it was mostly an idea debated outside the mainstream of American political thought. That changed when writer Ta-Nahisi Coates published his 2014 piece in The Atlantic, ‘The Case for Reparations.’ In the years since, political leaders and members of the public have begun to take the issue more seriously. The most recent movement on the topic came this week, when the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties heard testimony on a piece of legislation known as HR 40. The bill proposes the creation of a federal commission to study reparations and recommend remedies for the harm caused by slavery and the discriminatory policies that followed abolition. That commission would also consider how the US would formally apologize for the institution of slavery.HR 40 has been repeatedly introduced in Congress since 1989, though it has never passed. ‘Now more than ever, the facts and circumstances facing our nation demonstrate the importance of HR 40 and the necessity of placing our nation on the path to reparative justice,’ Rep. Shelia Jackson Lee, the lead sponsor of the bill, said at the hearing. Lawmakers heard testimony from several people who spoke about why reparations were necessary for the nation to heal from slavery. Witnesses and experts pointed to how the concept had been applied internationally, as Germany did for the Holocaust, and even at home, after the internment of Japanese Americans. Crucially, the passage of HR 40 wouldn’t actually result in payouts to the descendants of enslaved Americans. Rather, it would establish a group of appointed leaders to make recommendations on what compensation and other remedies to provide and how to go about doing so. This may be the most contested part.”

We next look at how reparations might work. “Academics, lawyers and activists have given it a shot, though, and their estimates have ranged over the years from the billions to the quadrillions. A study published last year in The Review of the Black Political Economy offered several different figures based on a variety of estimation methods. Researchers looked at the Black-White wealth gap in 2018 and compared it to what slavery and discrimination were estimated to have cost the African American descendants of enslaved people. A method that considers the value of ’40 acres and a mule’ puts the amount at about $12 trillion in 2018 dollars. Based on the value that enslavers placed on enslaved people, the number is about $13 trillion. Using lost wages, the cost is at $18.6 trillion. And another model that calculates the value of lost freedom puts the number at $35 trillion. Those are conservative estimates, given that they are compounded by 3% interest, the authors note. At 6% interest, the numbers go as high as $16 quadrillion. Also worth noting is that those totals only deal with the slavery that happened from the time of the country’s founding until the end of the Civil War. They don’t account for slavery during the colonial period or the decades of legalized segregation and discrimination against Black Americans that followed emancipation. When it comes to a national slavery reparations effort, scholars and advocates generally agree that the US government should pay — given that it enshrined, supported and protected the institution of slavery. William Darity, professor of public policy at Duke University and co-author of ‘From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,’ told Quartz last year that the government could draw the money against the national debt and paid for it by selling treasury bonds — similar to how the coronavirus stimulus checks operated. ‘It can be done without creating new taxes,’ he told the publication. ‘We embrace the principles of modern monetary theory. The only barrier to increasing federal spending is the potential adverse impact on inflation. To minimize inflation, we advocate doing it over 10 years.’ Similarly, state governments might pay for state-level slavery reparations efforts. Advocates have also proposed having private businesses that financially benefited from slavery and rich families that owe a good portion of their wealth to slavery pay. As you might imagine, suing large groups of people to pay for reparations might not go over well. Others have suggested lawmakers could pass legislation to force families to pay up. But that might not be constitutionally sound. ‘I don’t think you can legislate and have those families pay,’ Malik Edwards, a law professor at North Carolina Central University, told CNN in 2019. ‘If you’re going to go after individuals you’d have to come up with a theory to do it through litigation. At least on the federal level Congress doesn’t have the power to go after these folks. It just doesn’t fall within its Commerce Clause powers.’ The Commerce Clause refers to the section of the US Constitution which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce among the states. For many proponents, yes. Reparations could come in the form of special social programs or land resources. It could mean a mix of cash and programs targeted to help Black Americans. Heath said that while financial payments are a key part of slavery reparations, the process should go beyond that. ‘There’s more forms to reparations than just financial compensation, although we absolutely have to calculate and evaluate that,’ she said. ‘But there also needs to be health care-specific reparations addressing psychological trauma and other mental harms, official truth-telling measures, official apologies for wrongdoing, institutional and legal reforms that challenge the current institutions that don’t serve to protect Black people today.’ Chuck Collins, an author and a program director at the Institute for Policy Studies, told CNN in 2019 that reparations could seek to address the discrimination Black people have experienced in home ownership or higher education. ‘Direct benefits could include cash payments and subsidized home mortgages similar to those that built substantial White middle-class wealth after World War II, but targeted to those excluded or preyed upon by predatory lending,’ he said at the time. ‘It could include free tuition and financial support at universities and colleges for first generation college students.’ Reparation funds could also be used to provide one-time endowments to start museums and historical exhibits on slavery, Collins said.”

Now let’s look a the arguments against reparations. “There are many. Opponents of reparations argue that all the slaves are dead, no White person living today owned slaves or that all the immigrants that have come to America since the Civil War don’t have anything to do with slavery. Also, not all Black people living in America today are descendants of enslaved people. As reparations were debated in the House this week, Republicans argued that such proposals were ‘divisive’ and that it would be ‘unfair to punish White Americans today for their ancestors’ mistakes.’ Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell opposed the idea in 2019, arguing ‘none of us currently living are responsible’ for what he called America’s ‘original sin.’ Others point out that slavery makes it almost impossible for most African Americans to trace their lineage earlier than the Civil War, so how could they prove they descended from enslaved people? Writer David Frum noted those and other potential obstacles in a 2014 piece for The Atlantic entitled ‘The Impossibility of Reparations,’ which was a counterpoint to Coates’ essay. Frum warned that any reparations program would eventually be expanded to other groups, like Native Americans, and he feared that reparations could create their own brand of inequality. ‘Within the target population, will all receive the same? Same per person, or same per family? Or will there be adjustment for need? How will need be measured?’ asked Frum, a former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. ‘And if reparations were somehow delivered communally and collectively, disparities of wealth and power and political influence within Black America will become even more urgent. Simply put, when government spends money on complex programs, the people who provide the service usually end up with much more sway over the spending than the spending’s intended beneficiaries.’ Conservative activist Bob Woodson decried the idea of reparations as ‘yet another insult to Black America that is clothed in the trappings of social justice’ in a column for The Hill in 2019. He also told CNN he feels America made up for slavery long ago, so reparations aren’t needed. ‘I wish they could understand the futility of wasting time engaging in such a discussion when there are larger, more important challenges facing many in the Black community,’ Woodson, the founder and president of the Woodson Center, said. ‘America atoned for the sin of slavery when they engaged in a civil war that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives. Let’s for the sake of argument say every Black person received $20,000. What would that accomplish?’ “

As this article tells us, “President Joe Biden supports a study on whether descendants of enslaved people in the United States should receive reparations, White House spokeswoman Jen Psaki said on Wednesday, as the issue was being debated on Capitol Hill. Psaki told reporters that Biden ‘continues to demonstrate his commitment to take comprehensive action to address the systemic racism that persists today.’ Reparations have been used in other circumstances to offset large moral and economic debts – paid to Japanese Americans interned during World War Two, to families of Holocaust survivors and to Blacks in post-apartheid South Africa. But the United States has never made much headway in discussions of whether or how to compensate African Americans for more than 200 years of slavery and help make up for racial inequality. … Biden told the Washington Post last year that ‘we must acknowledge that there can be no realization of the American dream without grappling with the original sin of slavery, and the centuries-long campaign of violence, fear, and trauma wrought upon Black people in this country.’ But like nearly all of the Democratic presidential candidates at the time, he did not embrace the idea of specific payments to enslaved people’s descendants, instead promising ‘major actions to address systemic racism’ and further study. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last June following the death in police custody in Minneapolis of George Floyd, an African-American man, found clear divisions along partisan and racial lines, with only one in 10 white respondents supporting the idea and half of Black respondents endorsing it. Calls have been growing from some politicians, academics and economists for such payments to be made to an estimated 40 million African Americans. Any federal reparations program could cost trillions of dollars, they estimate. Supporters say such payments would act as acknowledgement of the value of the forced, unpaid labor that supported the economy of Southern U.S. states until the Civil War ended slavery in 1865, the broken promise of land grants after the war and the burden of the century and a half of legal and de facto segregation that followed.”

This article from Isle of Wight County in Virginia addresses their confederate monument. “After months of debate, the Isle of Wight Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Thursday to relocate the Confederate monument that has stood at the front of the county’s courthouse complex for 116 years. The county will now have to wait 30 days before solidifying the controversial structure’s future home. Under state law, a local government must first solicit proposals for museums, historical societies, governments or military battlefields to take ownership of the monument. However, barring any offers, the monument will be moving west along Route 258 to a piece of property in the Walters area of the county, owned by Volpe Boykin. ‘There is a general consensus of this board that it should not remain on county property,’ said Chairman Dick Grice (Smithfield District) ahead of the vote. The decision comes more than seven months after Supervisor Rudolph Jefferson, who happens to be the board’s only Black member, first proposed using new state law to move the war monument. … Isle of Wight is the ninth in the Hampton Roads region to order a move. Leaders in Virginia Beach, Portsmouth, Williamsburg, Newport News, Franklin, Surry, and Pasquotank County, North Carolina, are some localities in the region that have also voted to relocate theirs. … At a fiery public hearing in September, both sides came out in force to share their views. An eight-member task force — made up of five white members and three Black members — began meeting Oct. 7 after the majority of the Board of Supervisors decided they still wanted more input before making a decision. The task force ultimately brought forward locations the monument could be relocated to, as well as ways it could be contextualized. The force identified the Town of Windsor Cemetery as the top choice for the relocation of the monument. Earlier this month, Windsor’s Town Council expressed they did not have interest in that idea. Boykin’s property was the second choice. ‘No one can preserve our history and heritage better than we can,’ Boykin said in a statement following the vote.”

Also from Virginia we have this article regarding James Madison University renaming buildings. “James Madison University’s Board of Visitors today approved the renaming of three buildings on the campus’s historic Quad for Drs. Joanne V. and Alexander Gabbin; Dr. Sheary Darcus Johnson (’70, ’74M); and Doris Harper Allen (’19H) and Robert Walker Lee. The recommendations were made by senior leadership in collaboration with the Campus History Committee. In July 2020 the BOV voted unanimously to remove the names of three Confederate military leaders from buildings in the bluestone section of campus. At that time, temporary names for these buildings were assigned with the understanding that a process would take place to recommend new building names. To provide recommendations for permanent renaming, the 47-member Campus History Committee received extensive input from members of the campus and extended community. Recommendations were developed over the course of several months, and they were shared with university leadership for consideration and review. ‘Today’s decision to rename three buildings on our campus is part of our deliberate effort to underscore JMU’s commitment to being a welcoming and inclusive institution,’ said Jonathan Alger, JMU president. ‘These names help us to tell a more complete history of our institution. They highlight and celebrate the contributions and accomplishments of important individuals and groups who have historically been underrepresented in prominent campus namings. Collectively they represent faculty, staff, students, alumni and prominent members of our local community.’ The university made the following recommendations to the Board of Visitors, which approved the recommendations during its regularly scheduled meeting today:

  • Mountain Hall will be renamed Gabbin Hall in honor of outstanding faculty members Drs. Joanne V. and Alexander Gabbin, professors at JMU for more than 35 years;
  • Justice Studies Hall will be renamed Darcus Johnson Hall in honor of Dr. Sheary Darcus Johnson (’70, ’74M), JMU’s first Black student and graduate; and
  • Valley Hall will be renamed Harper Allen–Lee Hall, in honor of Doris Harper Allen (’19H) and Robert Walker Lee, both dedicated staff members and unsung heroes in dining services and maintenance respectively, as well as active members of the Harrisonburg and Rockingham County communities.

‘These recommendations reflect the values of JMU and are intended to acknowledge and redress past barriers and omissions. They advance our culture of inclusion and reinforce our dedication to an equitable environment where all can learn and work. Today’s approval was guided by a comprehensive and thoughtful process that provided the opportunity to reflect and grow with our evolving campus culture. The board expresses gratitude to the many committed individuals of the JMU community who have given input and worked to provide the critical information needed to cast our unified vote,’ said Lara Major, rector of the JMU BOV.”

In this article from the world of country music we learn, ” Country star Luke Combs has apologized for appearing with Confederate flags, saying he is now aware of how painful that flag is. Combs addressed the images during a conversation with singer Maren Morris on Wednesday during a panel for radio broadcasters about accountability in country music. It came weeks after another top country star Morgan Wallen was removed from radio stations and suspended by his label after being caught on video using a racial slur. Panel moderator and NPR music critic Ann Powers asked Combs about those images during a Q&A for the Country Radio Seminar, an annual country radio broadcasters conference, that was held online this year. ‘There’s no excuse for those images,’ said Combs, a 30-year-old North Carolina singer-songwriter who has had two multiplatinum albums and several hit country songs. Combs said the images were from seven or eight years ago and as a younger man, he did not understand what that flag meant. ‘And as I have grown in my time as an artist and as the world has changed drastically in the last five to seven years, I am now aware of how painful that image can be to someone else,’ Combs said. ‘I would never want to be associated with something that brings so much hurt to someone else.’ He said he was addressing the old images now because he wanted to show as a highly visible country artist that people can change and learn from their mistakes. He also wanted to encourage more people in the country music industry to have those hard conversations. The genre has been having a racial reckoning even before Wallen’s actions, but top artists have often been reluctant talk about race, both in the genre’s present and its past. ‘I am trying to learn. I am trying to get better,’ Combs said.”


Robert E. Lee statue at Gettysburg National Military Park/LRR2020

This article concerns confederate monuments in national parks. According to the article, “If you knew nothing about the U.S. Civil War and traveled to Gettysburg National Military Park, you might be forgiven for believing the South won, based on a reading of the monuments alone. The statue of Southern commander Robert E. Lee on horseback, which also serves as the monument to the fighting sons of his home state of Virginia, stands at 41 feet tall, including both statue and pedestal. It’s more than double the height of the similar equestrian statue of Union Gen. George Gordon Meade that sits across the field, despite the fact that Meade was the victor at Gettysburg, helping to turn the tide of the war. Lee’s prominence at Gettysburg, along with the estimated 1,700 Confederate commemorative works that still stand across the United States, is now under scrutiny. In recent years, the nation’s racist history has been debated and confronted in a variety of ways, with Confederate names and symbols being removed from public squares, schools, and flagpoles across the South and elsewhere. And yet, the Confederate battle flag is still hoisted aloft and visible in places like the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and at the U.S. Capitol insurrection last month, not to mention on countless car bumpers, t-shirts, and gift shop tables. Last summer, Democratic lawmakers in the fiscal 2021 spending package included language that would have required the National Park Service to remove Confederate monuments from all National Park System sites within six months. Although that language didn’t make it into the final bill, it’s likely to be reintroduced this year. The proposal is raising a debate not only between those who support Confederate symbols and those who say they prop up a legacy of hate, but between those who say the Park Service needs more time to inventory and consider these works and those who say the Confederacy has been given time enough. At issue, too, is the crusty legacy of the ‘Lost Cause,’ the mythologizing of the Southern warriors that recast them as fighting not to support slavery but to maintain states’ rights (overlooking, of course, that those “rights” included enslaving other human beings). Most of the Confederate monuments erected on national parklands were placed there in the early 20th century, well after the war, during the height of Jim Crow segregation. They are not interpretive historical markers, opponents say, but symbols of white supremacy and oppression. The National Park Service was a willing participant in this effort, allowing groups like the United Daughters of the Confederacy to sponsor monuments on its battlefields that helped to elevate and equalize the losing side. Hence, the existence of the Lee monument at Gettysburg, erected in 1917, and the Robert E. Lee Memorial, as his former home in Arlington, Virginia, is designated — despite the fact that Lee was an often-brutal slaveowner who took up arms against his own government. ‘This is not about erasing history or denying anyone’s heritage,’ said U.S. Rep. Betty McCollum, Democrat from Minnesota and a key advocate of the removal legislation, during a Congressional subcommittee debate last July. ‘This is about whether we’re willing to do the hard work needed to confront the truth of our history and to work to right past wrongs. In order to do that, it means ending the use of Confederate symbols which continue to be used today to intimidate and terrorize millions of our American citizens.’ McCollum isn’t sure yet what form the removal requirement might take, but she plans to support it, and she thinks the NPS is well positioned to move quickly. ‘As to whether or not I’ll do formal legislation, I’ll still be making sure I continue to work on removing these symbols of discrimination and oppression on public lands,’ McCollum said in an interview with the Traveler. ‘People at the Park Service are smart enough and well-trained enough that they probably have a good idea what they have [in terms of Confederate monuments]. The people who work on our public lands — they are professionals. I’m sure many have been thinking about it already.’ Other park advocates argue, however, that the Park Service needs far more time to consider the monuments and their specific roles in their particular landscapes, noting that some monuments might be historically significant in their own right, perhaps because of the artist who sculpted or designed them or some other reason. The ground disturbance from monument removal could also trigger federally required archaeological assessments or other studies to discern impacts on the historic landscape. ‘This is not an issue to be resolved by an act of Congress,’ says former NPS Director Jon Jarvis, now the chair of the board for UC-Berkeley’s Institute for Parks, People, and Biodiversity. ‘There are literally thousands of monuments to the soldiers of the North and the South on the various Civil War battlefields maintained by the NPS. Many are important because they mark a particular battle, a skirmish, victory or loss, on the actual ground where people died. These monuments are used by the NPS staff in their interpretation of the events and are often important for context. That is very different from a bronze guy on a horse in the middle of a traffic circle placed there to intimidate.’ Jarvis encourages President Biden to request that Congress commission a study, led by prominent and diverse historians, to evaluate the monuments against a set of agreed-upon standards to help determine which ones get removed or put in some other context, such as a museum or warehouse. ‘A better symbolic measure by Congress would be to direct the Park Service to complete an analysis of its monuments and report back in two years and then they would get to work on it,’ Jarvis says. ‘What is needed to respond to those who were disenfranchised during the Civil War and during Reconstruction is a reinterpretation of the Civil War, and we stated that during the sesquicentennial. Rather than focus on taking down this or that monument…provide the platform for the telling of a broader story and to not respond to a quick fix.’ “


A statue of Confederate Gen. Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson long has stood on the battlefield at Manassas National Battlefield Park/Kurt Repanshek

The article continues, “Although the National Parks Conservation Association hasn’t released an official policy on this yet, the organization generally supports giving NPS the time and resources to assess its Confederate works. ‘We want the Park Service to have the opportunity to inventory their commemorative works,’ says NPCA’s Mid-Atlantic Senior Regional Director Joy Oakes. ‘We want the professionals to have a thoughtful and informed process.’ NPCA Advisory Board member Edwin Fountain, a historic preservation expert, adds that some monuments, such as the Lee statue at Gettysburg, are more than 100 years old and are therefore considered ‘contributing features’ on the historic landscape, to use preservation parlance. ‘So on what grounds do you just start saying, ‘Oh, we’re going to start removing contributing features from national parks.’ I’m not saying that ends all debate, but it’s got to be part of the debate.’ Others believe, however, that these symbols are keeping a significant segment of people away from these parks. It’s worth noting that only an estimated 7 percent of national park visitors are Black. ‘The Park Service needs to ask, ‘Who’s coming to your site and who’s not coming to your site?‘ ‘ says Denise Meringolo, a professor of public history at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Museums, Monuments, and National Parks: Toward a New Genealogy of Public History. ‘Those monuments are a barrier to significant portions of the audience, for whom they are not simply inaccurate or annoying. They are traumatizing.’ Meringolo says that people should reconsider the prevalent assumption that monuments are permanent. ‘If a goal of a monument is to represent some kind of civic culture that we believe is worth discussing, and if we want to put up these things to represent common values, when someone says, ‘This doesn’t represent the values we hold dear,’ maybe it’s time to take them down. They’re not doing the work that we think they are doing. A monument is always an assertion of power and authority. It’s staking a claim.’ Historian and educator Kevin Levin, author of Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War’s Most Persistent Myth, says it’s worth listening to those whose voices have long been silenced and to use this moment as an opportunity for more context and interpretation. ‘Many of these monuments went up at a time when African Americans were simply disfranchised,’ Levin says. ‘They were, for legal reasons, for political reasons, just unable to voice their own view about how the war should be commemorated in public spaces. And so I think for that reason alone, this has to be taken seriously. But at the same time, I draw a distinction between Park Service sites like Gettysburg and, say, Richmond’s Monument Avenue.’ Whether all or just some of the monuments stay or go, Levin believes there is enough NPS battlefield land to provide additional context about the Confederate monuments so that visitors can get a more complete picture of how and why they got there, and what their existence says about who we are. ‘I do think there’s an opportunity at places like Gettysburg, acknowledging that the Confederate monuments are problematic to many people,’ Levin continues. ‘The Park Service has a responsibility to face that.’ “


The Confederate Memorial in Nicholasville stands on the lawn of the Jessamine County courthouse in Nicholasville, Ky., Silas Walker LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

The final three articles concern the movement to remove the confederate monument in Jessamine County, Kentucky. The first article tells us, “Jessamine County’s 1896 memorial to its Confederate dead sits just off center of the beautiful Italianate courthouse on Main Street. It embodies Kentucky’s fractured, often nonsensical Civil War history: Kentucky never joined the Confederacy, Jessamine County probably had just as many Union soldiers as Confederate, and the statue was purchased at an Ohio fire sale of a Union statue, which required retooling the soldier’s belt buckle from USA (United States of America) to CSA (Confederate States of America). Like most Confederate monuments, the statue was Southern propaganda raised more than three decades after the war, in the height of racial terror throughout the South, when statues served as a set-in-stone reminder to Black citizens that while they might have been freed, they were still second class citizens. Now there’s a movement to move the Nicholasville statue from its courthouse perch to the nearby Maple Grove cemetery, which has a section of Confederate dead, most of them from the Battle of Perryville. A petition was first started by a 16-year-old girl named Jenna Sparks who was horrified by the statue when she first walked by it at age 10; she’s been joined by several Black and white pastors and concerned citizens who worry that aside from the obvious racism, a Confederate monument could be the difference between Nicholasville being perceived as a delightful, bustling small town or a racially hostile backwater. ‘We have to get rid of racist monuments,’ said Sparks, who launched the petition after Nicholasville’s Black Lives Matter protest this summer. ‘It’s a sign of oppression and it doesn’t belong in our country because our country was supposed to be built on the idea that we’re all created equal.’ Sparks’ petition is similar to other attempts, some successful like Lexington, where the statues were quickly and quietly moved to the nearby cemetery; some extremely unsuccessful, like Charlottesville, Va., where a protest against moving statues ended with days of violent riots by white supremacists that ended with the death of Heather Heyer. But advocates of moving the Nicholasville statue have some compelling arguments in addition to the usual ones, you know, that contend communities should no longer memorialize and celebrate the attempt to keep one race of people in bondage. For one, the Jessamine County Courthouse is still a working, breathing institution, where people of all races go to get their drivers’ licenses, get married or go to court. As attorney and Jessamine County resident Peter Brackney pointed out: ‘This is an active courthouse, this is where justice is pursued — what does it say to African Americans that the Lost Cause mentality is there on display on the courthouse lawn?’ The other argument is named Thomas Brown. Thomas Brown was a 19-year-old Black man accused of assault on a white woman and jailed in Nicholasville. According to newspaper accounts at the time, he never went to trial. On Feb. 6, 1902, a mob of white men stormed the jail and hanged Brown from a tree near the memorial. No one was ever prosecuted for the crime, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., which has researched and memorialized lynchings in every state. ‘Women Cheer Mob’s Work,’ was one headline describing it. Part of the South’s post-Civil War terror was falsely accusing Black men of looking or touching or attacking white women. Most of them were either judged guilty by a jury of white men or given a rougher justice at the hands of mobs. Brown was hardly the only one in Jessamine, or the rest of Kentucky, but his death lends a specially macabre cast to the Jessamine statue. Most people don’t know about Brown’s death, and why would they? It’s not memorialized at the site, and has only been written about in mostly academic tomes. But the man who did a lot of that documentation, University of Kentucky history professor George Wright, said people might learn about lynch mobs but reject the reality because of the cognitive dissonance between our ideas of the U.S. as a just system of government and one that allowed mobs to mete out that justice on the branches of trees. ‘The two of those go together, statues that symbolize white supremacy and violence to reinforce that white supremacy,’ said Wright, who wrote ‘Racial Violence In Kentucky: Lynchings, Mob Rule, and ‘Legal Lynchings.’ ‘But many people won’t accept it because it goes against their ideas of this country.’ In addition, Jessamine has a particularly complicated history because it is also the site of Camp Nelson, now part of the National Park Service. The camp was a major training ground for thousands of Black soldiers who came to the Union outpost there, escaping slavery to join the Union Army in exchange for their freedom. Their wives and children followed, and were often kicked out of the camp. One expulsion from Camp Nelson in November 1864 resulted in the deaths of more than 100 women and children, which led to new laws that protected those related to Black soldiers. UK history professor Amy Murrell Taylor wrote about Camp Nelson in her award-winning book, ‘Embattled Freedom: Journeys Through the Civil War’s Slave Refugee Camps.‘ ‘Camp Nelson really is a place of national distinction,’ she said. ‘It’s one of the few park service sites dedicated to Black history of the Civil War, and the Confederate monument really works against it. It’s really hard when Camp Nelson represents the advancement of the cause for freedom and then you have this monument that is celebrating the subjugation of that freedom.’ So far, there has been little official action or even discussion of moving the statue. That would have to come from Jessamine County Judge Executive David West, who is well aware of the political pitfalls surrounding the issue. ‘I’m in a search for solutions that is healing and moves everyone forward,’ he said. ‘I think the consensus seems to be that there has to be some action in this day and time. I don’t think we can retain a monument that is damaging to some people and in their eyes glorifies the Confederacy.’ At the same time, Jessamine County is just 4.6 percent Black, according to census figures. President Donald Trump won the county by 65 percent this time around. ‘Passions are very high on both sides of this,’ he said. Chris Ardery is a concerned citizen who favors leaving the statue where and how it stands. ‘I think it should stay because it represents part of our history, good or bad,’ he said. ‘If you erase the past, it will reoccur. That’s what we’ve got now.’ ” Of course, this is nonsense. removing a monument doesn’t erase history.

The article continues, “West favors the contextual solution, where the statue is reconfigured to show more of the history behind it. ‘We need explanations of epic proportions,’ he said. ‘The public at large mostly aren’t aware there was a movement to create a revisionist history. How do we make this to where it doesn’t alienate the people who want it maintained as it is, yet move the needle towards healing and inclusiveness?’ Except it’s hard to get to inclusiveness with a statue that represents what was an effort to continue the enslavement of an entire race. A statue that memorializes hate while ignoring the nearby mob slaying of a young man. ‘I know many of us want it removed,’ said Rev. Moses Radford, pastor of First Baptist Church of Nicholasville. ‘Three times as many want it to stay. A lot of people who know it don’t care, to be honest, it’s just another piece of history they want to forget.’ Thomas Brown has been forgotten, but in the wake of George Floyd’s death, this country is slowly and painfully coming to grips with a history that it ignored. Of course, the Confederate statue should be moved to Maple Grove, replaced by a plaque to Thomas Brown as a reminder that sometimes, the United States is a country of justice and some times it is not. Of course, it’s easier said than done. But it’s what Jessamine County powers-that-be should remember as the county grows, attracting people from all over who may not be as enamored with Confederate propaganda. Jessamine County, after all, hosted its own Black Lives Matter protest this summer, full of young people like Sparks who are beginning to come to terms with our past and future. It’s a future that doesn’t forget our most shameful history but doesn’t celebrate it either. Jason Schlafer works in Lexington but moved his multiracial family to Jessamine County because of its high quality of life, excellent schools and friendly people. ‘I love our community, it’s why we moved there 10 years ago,’ he said. ‘That statue however, does not reflect the values of our diverse and inclusive community.’ “


The Confederate Memorial in Nicholasville stands on the lawn of the Jessamine County courthouse in Nicholasville, Ky. A lynching occurred at the site in 1902. Now there’s a movement to get the Confederate statue moved to nearby Maple Grove Cemetery. SILAS WALKER LEXINGTON HERALD-LEADER

This post gives us more information. “So what does the Jessamine Confederate Monument honor and glorify? Its base contains various inscriptions which memorialize that ‘Lost Cause’ telling of history. Among the most offensive is this one: ‘Nor braver bled for brighter land nor brighter land had a cause so grand.’ The words do nothing but glorify the South and the systemic racism with which our nation still struggles. It does not belong on the lawn of a county’s seat of justice. It does not belong on the lawn of my county’s seat of justice.”


Inscription on the base of the Jessamine Confederate Monument.

The post continues, “Most curiously, the statue was originally that of a Union soldier to be located in an Ohio town. That town, however, could not raise the necessary funds. The Jessamine County association purchased the statue from the stone company for $1,500 and the belt buckle was modified from ‘USA’ to ‘CSA’. As the largest monument at the courthouse, the glorification of the Confederacy (which fought against the United States) diminishes others who are honored for their service in the Revolutionary War. Other conflicts in which Jessamine Countians fought for the United States are not recognized by monuments on the lawn. Yet, those who fought against the United States receive oversized glory. The Confederacy stood to retain an economic system that enslaved Black Americans. Jim Crow kept a knee upon the necks of freed African-Americans after Reconstruction hurriedly ended with the Compromise of 1877. The Ku Klux Klan intimidated. Justice was denied and unequally applied. It is a stained history that America has not overcome. One of the worst symbols of this systemic mistreatment exists at the end of a rope thrown over the branch of a tree. Six years after the Confederate Monument was dedicated on the courthouse lawn and only feet away from that monument, a lynching occurred. The date was February 6, 1902. A 19-year-old black man, accused of assaulting a white woman, was seized by a mob of some 200 people from the local jail. On the courthouse lawn in the shadow of the Confederate Monument, the mob lynched Thomas Brown in Nicholasville, Kentucky. When the monument was dedicated in 1896, it was done to memorialize the Confederate soldiers who had been disinterred from Camp Nelson and reburied at Maple Grove Cemetery just down Main Street in Nicholasville. It would seem altogether fitting for the statue to be relocated there to the cemetery. Such a move would follow what happened in Lexington with the relocation of the John C. Breckinridge and John Hunt Morgan statues from the courthouse lawn to the Lexington Cemetery. As a result, the monument could still tell a history (hopefully one that has been appropriately contextualized), but in a place that does not cause the monument to function as a state-sanctioned glorification of the Confederacy. The courthouse is a county-owned property and governed by the county’s fiscal court. Maple Grove Cemetery is city-owned. Both would need to consent to the relocation of the statue. And, of course, funding (or donated services) would need to be secured to remove and relocate the statue. The monument is, however, protected by state law. The Kentucky Military Heritage Commission serves as the gatekeeper against any listed site being ‘damaged or destroyed, removed or significantly altered’ without the Commission’s written consent. Removal of the statue, or relocation to Maple Grove Cemetery, would require approval from the Military Heritage Commission.”

Finally we have this article, which says, “The cause for which the Old South committed treason and tore the country apart in bloody strife was the preservation of slavery. President Abraham Lincoln believed the tragedy might be divine retribution for the terrible sin of slavery, and he imagined that the war might continue ‘until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.’ Lincoln’s words echoed those of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote: ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ For a short time, America was on the path to redemption, but by the end of the 19th century, Southern states were enacting Jim Crow laws to keep society segregated, and white supremacy and domestic terrorism were on the rise. Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Confederate general who massacred black Union soldiers after they had surrendered, was one of the founding leaders of the Ku Klux Klan, and his grandson and namesake, who was also a Klansman, was an early leader of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, formed by descendants of rebel soldiers to honor their memory. The SCV and other groups, including Daughters of the Confederacy, also celebrated the Lost Cause, a revisionist view of the antebellum South that imagined it as an idyllic way of life exemplified by a code of chivalry. In the years around the turn of the century, these groups celebrated that legacy by erecting many monuments and statues, including the one that stands on the courthouse lawn in Nicholasville, staring defiantly toward Main Street. Look closely, though, and if you’re a real Civil War history buff, you’ll notice that the statue isn’t that of a Confederate soldier at all. It is that of a Union soldier that a Southern heritage group bought for a bargain and had altered slightly so that the belt buckle and knapsack have the CSA insignia of the Confederate States of America. But everything else about it is Union. The 18-foot high statue was erected in 1896 during a ceremony attended by 3,500 people. Bennett H. Young of Jessamine County, who had been part of John Hunt Morgan’s cavalry, was the main speaker that day. … Jessamine County Judge-Executive David West has said he would like to ‘re-purpose’ the statue once more to represent both sides of the Civil War. ‘Let’s take the Confederacy off of it,’ he said. ‘It’s a Union soldier. Make it a tribute to all men and women of Jessamine County who served. Make it healing instead of divisive.’ He suggested including signs that give a broader view of what the war was about and that places it within the context of the longer struggle for freedom and equality. While I respect the judge’s reasoning and agree that this is a time for healing, I disagree that the best way to represent the history of the Civil War is to depict a neutral soldier. Soldiers are not neutral. A better solution would be to change the statue back to what it was — a Union soldier — by removing the CSA insignia. Also remove the words of tribute to the Lost Cause and put up a historic marker explaining the history of the statue and of Jessamine County’s divided loyalties during the Civil War. Let us remember our past, including our errors, but let us revere those who were right and who fought for, not against, freedom.”

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