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.
