My speech at the Saturday Rally

This isn't the actual text of my speech. I decided to further simplify it. However, it is what I talked about to a cheering audience. After the monuments there are other things to which we need to attend.

I think with the monuments being down, some of these things will happen without  anyone asking.

I do however, plan a mass mailing to churches where a church has hosted the United Daughters of the Confederacy or the Sons of Confederate Veterans. I do plan to write all the denominations which have lent their facilities to a national neo-Confederate convention. I think it will help that they know that someone is tracking this. The U.S. Military, the National Park Service, and the textbook publishers will be more of a challenge but I have some ideas.

I think after the monuments go down, they will be less willing to retain practices that enable neo-Confederacy and the Lost Cause.

As monuments start coming down, people will expect that their city follow suit. Chamber of Commerce groups will not want their city to have a Confederate monument. It will be a marker of backwardness and make their city an object of ridicule.

I am planning on making a video about what I saw at the Gettysburg National Park.

So with yesterdays speech I launched these topics.

I have been researching and leading a small resistance against the neo-Confederate movement for 25 years.

In 2015 after the Charleston massacre my co-author called and pointed out that not until peopled died did the state of South Carolina do the right thing and take down the Confederate flag.

After Heather Heyer was killed last Saturday the nation is flooded with calls to remove Confederate monuments, plaques, flags across the nation.

This leads me to ask.

How many will have to die before the National Park Service stops accommodating the Confederacy?

How many will have to die before the U.S. Military academies stop letting the United Daughters of the Confederacy give Confederate awards to cadets?

How many will have to die before the U.S. Military High School Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps program stop allowing the Sons of Confederate Veterans to give awards to cadets?

How many will have to die before American History textbooks, particularly in Texas, stop being Lost Causes, stop pandering to pro-Confederates?

How many church massacres will there have to be before American churches, mainstream churches, stop lending their facilities to the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy?

People shouldn’t have to die before we do the right thing.

In closing, I ask the United States military, I ask the textbook publishers, I ask the churches, I ask the National Park Service, I ask our city, our state, our nation, let us do the right thing, give up the Confederacy. 

Interviewed for Nationally Syndicated article by the McClatchy newspapers about public school American history textbooks and the Civil War

Nationally Syndicated article by the McClatchy newspapers about public school American history textbooks and the Civil War. The link is:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article27527029.html

The article has run in about a dozen papers across the nation.

For historians, however, there is little question that slavery was the driving factor in sparking secession and later the war. Teaching history incorrectly, they say, allows people to justify supporting the Confederacy without addressing related questions of racism. 

“If you don’t understand what the Civil War was about, you don’t have anything to argue against Confederate nationalism,” said Sebesta. “It’s an erasure of African-Americans in the South by saying the Confederacy was the South. It’s creating a Southern identity as a white identity.”

 It was interesting how the Children of the Confederacy was unwilling to explain what they were doing.

But with the exception of three attendees who like Shelby and her grandfather, Martin Schaller, agreed to interviews, it was hard to learn what the Children of the Confederacy conference teaches its members about the history of slavery and the role it played in sparking the Civil War. 

Conference organizers declined to share conference materials with anyone not registered for the conference. They said members of the organization could not speak to the news media without approval from the organization’s director general, who could not be located Thursday, the convention’s opening day.

Eventually, the general manager of the hotel where the convention is being held through Saturday ordered two McClatchy reporters to leave.

The impasse was perhaps predictable. More than 10 phone calls throughout the week leading up to the conference, and several emails to the organization’s director general, went unreturned.

The group’s unwillingness to share its approach to Civil War history makes it hard to know how its program fits into what a growing number of historians and experts say is the perpetuation of dangerous myths about the war and the antebellum South that are common in public school texts and are fueled in seemingly innocent war re-enactments.

 It is always interesting when a group is secretive about what they do.

Read more here: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/article27527029.html#storylink=cpy