Why Georgia Confederate History Month
Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea©
Don’t assume that all supporters of the effort to create White History Month in Georgia are rural white folk whose ancestors sacrificed life and limb on behalf of the Confederate States of America in the Civil War. As a black female lifelong resident of the former confederate states, I think the idea has some merit.
Firstly, history matters. In order to understand and improve current race relations in the South, one needs a deep understanding of the 19th century. Take CSA, for example. How many school children know that it stand for Confederate States of America? Just like United States of America. CSA was a nation, with a capital in Milledgeville. It printed currency, held elections, seated a Congress and, of course, conscripted military forces. The CSA purported to be a sovereign power. I am not sure why the Civil War is called the War Between the States, when actually it was a war by the CSA AGAINST the United States.
When the Confederate states, led by my home state of South Carolina, seceded from the United States and fired on federal Fort Sumter, it became a sworn enemy of the United States. It fired on Fort Sumter in a deliberate act of violence to provoke the war. Had the CSA won the war, slavery would have been legal in every state and territory. Eventually slavery would have died out, but it is impossible to predict how long it would have taken.
Iraq’s enmity toward the United States pales by comparison to that of South Carolina, Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi. After all, Iraq did not fire upon the United States. When one partner withdraws from a partnership, the law teaches that the partnership is dissolved. When the southern states seceded from the United States, the nation was similarly dissolved. It existed no more. The Civil War was not to “preserve the Union”, but to reestablish it.
We need to unearth the realities of the history of the Confederacy in order to move forward as one state. The South was never fully reconstructed. For example, school students are taught much about “Radical Reconstruction” in the aftermath of the Civil War. Union troops occupied the former confederate states to keep law and order and to protect blacks from CSA veterans who had a hard time admitting that the cause was indeed lost. Reconstruction-era politicians were routinely vilified until evidence filtered out that blacks elected to state legislatures and Congress between 1868 and 1880 ended the notorious Georgia chain gang, instituted free public schools and provided support for a coast-to-coast railroad system, ushering in Henry Grady’s New South.
Whenever an apology or reparations for slavery are discussed Confederate heritage devotees invariably cite the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Confederate soldiers as recompense for the iniquities of slavery. While that argument has some merit, those deaths did not redeem the decades of exclusion, voter intimidation, economic discrimination and violence that followed the end of slavery. An apology for post-Reconstruction Jim Crow and present-day patterns of exclusion should be the order of the day.
For example, Redemption – the period of time after Reconstruction ended with the Tilden Hayes compromise in 1877 – is rarely discussed in high school and college texts. Southerners, eager to regain control of what they considered to be their rightful place, organized posses of vigilantes who terrorized blacks and their sympathizers. The term Redemption was an early use of political euphemism to put a benign face on one of the most terrible and shameful periods in American history. Thousands of blacks were shot, maimed, butchered and lynched to intimidate them from exercising the vote and achieving social and economic parity.
I agree with the proponents that too few of us have any sense of the Confederacy. Thus, we are unable to recognize its tentacles that creep stealthily into the 21st Century. The proponents of Confederate History Month say they don’t want to celebrate the War Between the States. I take them at their word in hope that we finally explore the period, its philosophy and history and educate the public about the Lost Cause. We could learn much from it.
Secondly, the adoption of Confederate History Month will show the nation how alive and well race-baiting is in the South. Despite gleaming and economically vibrant cities like Birmingham, Atlanta and Charlotte, the old south still lives in the presumed white superiority of some. We are fighting a cold war in Georgia – between rural conservatives and urban progressives. There is no way to understand super-stringent Voter ID laws, unchecked racial profiling by law enforcement, vehement opposition to affirmative action in even the meekest forms and extraordinarily high levels of minority incarceration without reference to race.
The State of Georgia’s recurring passion to control Hartsfield Jackson, a grossly under-funded Early Intervention program to bolster the educational opportunity of poor children, the latter-day secession of Sandy Springs from Fulton County, the State’s failure to support Grady Hospital, Cobb and Gwinnett’s refusal to join MARTA are all evidence of racial enmity, fueled by the fear of economic competition and fiercely-held (if subliminal) attitudes of white supremacy. The fact that we still bear the sins of the Confederacy is everywhere evident in today’s Georgia politics. Confederate History Month may prove to be the same kind of turning point for this Civil War that the televised dogs and fire hoses in Birmingham proved to be for the second Civil War forty years ago.
Blacks, whites and the region suffered culturally and economically for the Lost Cause, and continue to do so to this day. As Martin Luther King preached, unearned suffering is redemptive. Not the kind of Redemption practiced during the closing decades of the 19th century that gave birth to the Ku Klux Klan, but the redemption that comes from understanding and reconciliation. The more we know about the Confederacy, the sooner we can consign it to the ashbin of history. If Confederate History Month can help us finally accept our shared destiny across the chasm of race, then bring it on.
