Confronting Difficult Southern History

For nearly a decade now the public presence of Confederate monuments and flags have created numerous upheavals all across the Southern states over continuing to honor heroes of the Confederate States of America along with strident contentiousness over how the Civil War and the Reconstruction era in American history are told and remembered. Some Southerners look with pride at these old memorials to the Confederacy and at Confederate flags as valued reminders of their regional heritage and the sacrifices made by their ancestors. Many others see Confederate flags and memorials as symbols of our nation’s racist history and the perniciousness of the idea of white superiority which no longer should be honored. In short, the Confederate (battle) flag and the thousands of Confederate monuments and memorials erected during the Jim Crow era have become divisive symbols that challenge deeply held perceptions about the ugly history of racism in American history and about how Southern heritage is appropriated honored today.

As a history major in college and a Southerner by birth, I have long had a fondness for the preservation of my family heritage and my Southern identity along with the South’s historical places and events. Just recently I made yet another trip to historic Charleston, South Carolina to bask in its Southern charm and history while placing flowers on my grandmother’s grave in a small town close to Charleston. I am also a great grandson of a Confederate soldier who is buried in an old cemetery just two miles from Stone Mountain, Georgia.  The picture above to the left is of the headstone on my great-grandfather’s grave which includes a small brass from the State of Georgia signifying he was a Confederate veteran.  In addition to his name and the dates of his birth and death, the headstone has an engraving indicating he was in Georgia Regimen 1 of the Confederate Army.  However, my appreciation for my family history and Southern heritage has not blinded me to the misguided cause of the Confederacy to defend and preserve the institution of slavery and the ideology of white supremacy.

Despite the efforts of some of us in the South today to sanitize the causes of the Civil War in American history and to honor our ancestors who fought for the Confederacy, the sad truth is that the Southern Lost Cause was predicated on white racism and sedition against the United States of America. Historical records themselves undermine Southern claims that Confederate states were only exercising their Constitutional rights to enact state sovereignty. leaving the Union. Likewise, to claim that honoring Confederate veterans today is only about “heritage not hate” conveniently overlooks the continued association of Confederate flags and monuments with white supremacy groups. Those who suggest that Confederate symbols no longer reflect the horrid values of slavery and white superiority are either extremely ignorant about American history or naive about the symbolic racism embodied in them.  Over the past 8 years I have been working with a racial reconciliation effort in Georgetown, Texas were I now live to ask our County Commissioners to remove the Confederate monument that stands in front of our Williamson County Courthouse (see the picture above on the right).  For white Southerners to attempt to whitewash these Confederate symbols is tantamount to telling African Americans that racism no longer exists in America simply because we have elected an African American President.  

Anyone who questions why Texas and the ten other Southern states joined the Confederacy in 1860-61 should read the reasons the secessionists themselves gave in the Declarations they wrote at the time. Here is what the Texans said in their Declaration of Secession at their Convention in Austin in 1861:
“We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.
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”.
(for documentation on the reasons the Confederate states gave read Apostles of Disunion: Southern Secession Commissioners and the Causes of the Civil War by Charles B. Dew, University Press of Virginia, 2001)

In recent years, some politicians have attempted to deflect attention away from the ugly and sordid history of the Confederate insurrection against the Union and to defend monuments and memorials to Confederate heroes by suggesting that, to tell the truth about our nation’s history of racism and to remove Confederate monuments amounts to rewriting history. The resistance to confronting the truth about this history is often perplexing and disturbing. Since 2014 I have been a part of a local effort in Georgetown, Texas to have a state-sanctioned historical marker placed next to the Confederate monument that has stood at our county courthouse since 1916. We researched the history of this particular Confederate monument and made an application to the Texas Historical Commission for a plague that would explain the origins of this monument and what it represented at the time it was erected as an educational feature of this monument. The resistance to this application expressed by our County Commissioners reflected many of the same entrenched Southern beliefs about what they see as contested history regarding the Civil War and the Jim Crow era. Not surprisingly, only one of the six white commissioners voted in favor of asking our state’s historical commission to consider developing such an educational plague to be placed next to this local Confederate monument as an alternative to removing the monument.  To learn more about the proposed marker click here

From these efforts, I have come to realize that learning hard facts about America’s history of racism is extremely difficult for many white Southerners, particularly when white identity and heritage are called into question. As a descendant of a Confederate veteran, I am glad the cause that my great grandfather fought for during the Civil War was lost. I do not want my hubris about my Southern heritage to keep me from recognizing the misguided evil that gave rise to the Confederacy. Rather than glorifying the legacy of the Confederacy by venerating the soldiers as defenders of states’ rights, I believe it would be more historically honest and certainly more racially healing to simply acknowledge the evil causes the Confederacy represented. Somehow, we have to get beyond defending Southern pride to recognize the good, the bad and the ugly in our history and how we are still struggling today with some of the misguided racist ideas from our past. There are good reasons why Germany, Austria, and Hungary have all banned the flying of the Nazi swastika and that Walmart, Amazon, and other businesses no longer sell Confederate flags and paraphernalia. It’s time for our nation and our local communities in the South to put away all the Confederate flags and to relocate Confederate monuments to museums or cemeteries where Confederate soldiers may be buried.

For all those who want to continue to give Confederate monuments public places of honor in our communities or think the consternation over all things Confederate is much ado about nothing, I would encourage them to watch this perspective offered by John Oliver, a comedian with an uncanny and even entertaining take on truth-telling- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5b_-TZwQ0I