There are efforts across Texas to bring down Confederate monuments. There are so many efforts happening at the same time I have adopted strategies to help all of them at once.
I am taking Weatherford, Texas, which is west of Fort Worth, Texas as my test case.
It is about the Weatherford UDC praising the Reconstruction KKK and I place it in context of the national neo-Confederate groups praising the KKK.
The importance of this to the rest of Texas and even beyond Texas is that I supply the broader context in such a manner that you can just remove the Weatherford component and put in your local UDC pro-KKK information.
Almost any UDC chapter in the 1910s was likely promoting pro-Reconstruction KKK material. By doing some simple online research you can get that information and put it in my Weatherford essay and have an essay for your town. So iother counties where there are efforts underway to remove the Confederate monuments can take this essay and swap out the Weatherford component and swamp in their local UDC pro-KKK component.
This essay allows me to show people where to do research to find stuff like this, but more importantly that there is stuff to dig up.
In the past I would be blogging about each monument controversy or issue regarding the Confederacy. Now there are so many monuments going down and Confederate symbols being removed I am overwhelmed. Also, what really do I have to offer in commentary? They are going down without really any opposition. I am somewhat stunned by it all. I think maybe they overlooked this and I find they haven't, maybe there overlooked that, and I find they haven't. There is stuff I never heard of or I had forgotten about and it is being dealt with.
One of my activities is to track how Breitbart reports on contested history, monuments, historical memory, etc and I have a fairly comprehensive set of Breitbart articles filed away. But the problem is that it is overwhelming me. I print them out in the morning, some more around noon, and then in the evening and staple them and then hand write their date on them so I can organize them and find them easily. I have selected Breitbat since they represent the ideology of the White House and they seem to comprehensively cover the issues of interest.
Also, I am helping out local activists. One set wants to rename Lamar St. in Dallas to Botham Jean Boulevard. The other wants to rename Woodrow Wilson High School in the Dallas school district.
And I am on to something really huge concerning Dallas. It will rewrite a part of American history and explode the establishment view of the Dallas past. Taking a lot of time, but it won't be long before I am finished. Maybe in August.
So I have been really busy.
No doubt the school text books which pander to the Lost Cause and have uncritical accounts of thee Confederacy a free pass will not be acccepted for much longer.
With the upcoming elections it is likely that Confederate monuments in national parks will be subject to review.
I still have a few tasks left to bring down the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV). Some churches still pander to them, JROTC is working with them, and the UDC is still giving gifts at U.S. Military academies. All this will need action. But the SCV and UDC memberships are disappearing with age anyways just like the Civil War Round tables. It remains to be seen that I need to do much at all. I might want to focus more on personal things now that the neo-Confederate movement is crashing and coming to an end.
I am sure there will be odds and ends to do in 2021, but this is bringing up what will be next for me. After Neo-Confederacy is demolished what do I do?
It might be argued there will be odds and ends to follow up on. However, the few counties or cities with Confederate monuments will likely have their own local groups dealing with it and I won't need to be involved.
As I have said in earlier blogs, the few places which still have Confederate monuments will increasingly be seen as backward and creepy. When there are a couple hundred Confederate monuments in a state, any one monument won't cause much comment or stand out. When there are only five left or three, they will be in the news as the last Confederate monumnts in the state and the source of never ending news as the struggle continues over them and gives the locations a really bad repubation.
For a city or county the fact that they have become that creepy place in movies, will sink in when they lose competition for a processing or manufacturing plant or distribution depot or some facility. It will sink in when businesses there have difficulty in attracting talent and holding talent.
So the remaining monumentts will likely take care of themselves.
I think by the end of 2021 I will have the neo-Confederates out of the establishment also
So what I am doing and I am already transitioning to it, is work on the racialization of the landscape as a whole and not restricted to only Confederate items or even Confederate and slavery related items, but everything.
I have done a first draft theorization about landscape reparations. I am theorizing about street names. I am developing a set of tactics.
Anti-Neo-Confederate may become fairly inactive, not now, and not soon, but at some point I am going to be working on the issues of secession a lot, especially when the secession movements take off in response to Trump not being re-elected. And I will be working on deracializing the landscape. Those might be new blogs, and this blog will remain for the record and not be very active. I haven't decided that is the plan, but it might be the plan in the future.
So in conclusion, I am somewhat stunned, and after I wrap up dealing with the neo-Confederates I am going to move on to new challanges.
UPDATE:
The story is about a giant corporation doesn't want to locate major facility in town with Confederate monument. You can be assured that every chamber of commerce at some point will be thinking about this or cases like this. Every board member of some government economic panel for development will be hinking about this.
Confederate monuments were intensively spray painted in Richmond. In future disturbances over the issue of race Confederate monuments and other places will likely be considered targets.
Previously in civil disturbances prior to 2015 I didn't hear of cases where targeting Confederate memory was part of it. It might have happened, but it certainly wasn't frequent.
Joe Biden depends heavily on the support of African American Democrats and I think is the centrist Democratic candidate the Republicans fear.
Also, Breitbart is pushing a BLEXIT movement, a movement of African Americans out of the Democratic Party. They don't need a majority of African Americans to vote Republican to achieve their objectives electorally, but if they can get a 10 or 15% it would help a lot.
What is interesting about this is that Breitbart is bringing to the public's attention the UDC's history of praising the Reconstruction Ku Klux Klan.
For decades I couldn't get the liberal or neoliberal press interested in this. For decades the UDC was given a free pass. Suddenly, the reactionary right is publishing stuff like this about the UDC.
What it shows is that among conservatives and reactionaries the UDC is seen as something of little consequence and there are opportunities in reporting its racist agenda.
I have noticed that Breitbart isn't defending the Confederacy anymore, perhaps a little and I have missed it. An insurrection that would have destoryed America doesn't really fit into an agenda where you have the slogan, "Make America Great Again."
I think we will find some UDC members dropping out, but the big impact to the UDC is that younger people aren't going to join when when even the radical right is dumping the Confederacy and getting African American votes is seen as critical to advancing their agenda.
Also, a lot of the population that was really bought into the Confederacy is passing away. A conservative movement needs to look into the future, and they can see there is no future hanging on to the Confederacy.
I think the Breitbart direction maybe in response to this article in the 11/25/2018 article, Washington Post, titled, "The GOP is now the party of neo-Confederates."
Of course I couldn't get the Washington Post interested in neo-Confederates for decades, but now they are suddenly interested. The Washington Post provided a defense for Obama when he sent a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument.
It is 2019, soon to be 2020, and it seems not one wants the Confederacy and it is a liability the two major political parties want to pin on each other as a means to lible them.
The whining and dissembling of the United Daughters of the Confederac (UDC) is of note in this article. The reality of the UDC's agenda is denied by talking a narrative to make it an issue of something else.
There are some other notable aspects to this. Even with monuments locked into place by court order and by court decisions, there is still a lot of other things left to do in de-Confederating your locality. The neo-Confederates spent some time thinking of how to embedd the Confederacy into the landscape and historical memory in multiple ways. There is a substantial amount of non-monument things to be dealt with.
With each of these non-monument removals the remaining marks of the Confederacy landscape seem more anomalous and also less legitimate. They are seen as being present because the state against the local wishes has forced the Confederate monument on them. With each of these non-monument removals the issue is kept before the public.
The Confederate built landscape diminishes week by week. People just don't want it.
A Children of the Confederacy plaque with its neo-Confederate propaganda has been taken down from the Capitol building in Austin, Texas. The following is a photo of the plaque that I took.
I told them about the Children of the Confederacy essay published a few months later after the plaques installation in the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine gleefully describing the massacre of African American soldiers in Reconstruction Florida.
What is important in this story is that both the Republicans and Democrats decided it had to go and among the leadership of both parties they decided it had to go.
It wasn't the story where an African American Democrat was wanting to get rid of the plaque but white Democrats representing whiter districts were making up excuses.
It wasn't the story in which the Democrats wanted to take down the plaque but the Republicans were defending it.
Both Democrats and Republicans wanted the plaque gone, and it didn't take a big campaign to convince them. Granted that the plaque was in the Capitol building and the plaque had inanitites that were particularly offensive, but still it is a major change in the politics of deConfederating the landscape.
This sends out a message to all of Texas that glorification of the Confederacy is much less acceptable than it was. That doesn't mean that the battle is over,or that all glorification of the Confederacy is going to be rejected.
What it means is that if your town wants to keep its Confederate monument it will be seen as backward and out of touch and aberrant. Industries wanting to locate there will see your Confederate monument and think twice. People thinking of accepting a job offer there will have second thoughts.
As I have pointed out before one removal leads to another.
Wilkie sees the ideology of the Confederacy applicable to the present. From the conclusion of the article
"We have resisted Leviathan before but this time we face an almost irrestible combination of cultural standardization; utopian multiculturalism; political exhaustion; and militant drumbeats demanding Orewellian conformity."
Alternet ran an article based on the CNN article. This is the link.
UPDATE: I mailed a letter about this Children of the Confederacy essay to Joe Straus, speaker of the Texas House. Today I mail a letter to Texas Governor Abbott about this essay.
I am mailing this letter today. I will be mailing other elected officials in Austin, Texas and I will be letting others know. I will have some extracts of the essay in this blog.
UPDATE2: I sent out a press release to a lot of media in Austin. Next I will be sending out some press releases to media in Dallas.
October
24, 2017
[Address was here.]
edwardsebesta@gmail.com
Texas House Representative
Eric Johnson
Room 1N.7
P.O. Box
2910
Austin,
Texas 78768
Dear Hon.
Johnson:
I applaud
your efforts to have the Children of the Confederacy plaque removed from the
Capitol building. They are a pernicious organization that is run by the United
Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
I enclose an
essay by a member of the Children of the Confederacy published in the United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine,
March 1960, in which the massacre of African American troops is celebrated and
thought humorous. This article was
published just a few months after the Children of the Confederacy plaque was
put on the building. I enclosed the cover of the magazine issue, and the table
of contents. The article celebrating the slaughter of African American troops
is titled, “Hog and Hominy Lick Carpetbaggers.” The UDC though highly enough of
this essay to publish it in their magazine.
This essay
isn’t an anomaly, but is consistent with the values of the United Daughters of
the Confederacy promotes. They have in South Carolina a museum to the violent
Red Shirts which they call a shrine. The UDC for decades in the early 20th
century celebrated the KKK as heroes. In the 21st century they have
less directly promoted books that celebrated the KKK as heroes.
My
curriculum vitae is online. http://www.templeofdemocracy.com/curriculum-vitae.html.
I am published by the Univ. of Texas Press, Univ. Press of Mississippi,
peer-reviewed academic journals, last one at Cambridge Univ. I was awarded the
Spirit of Freedom medal by the African American Civil War Museum in Washington,
D.C.
I have
additional information about the Children of the Confederacy and their
instruction about the Ku Klux Klan.
I have a lot
of research information about the Capitol Confederate monuments also.
I discuss the Red Shirts, Michael Andrew Grissom, Frank Conner, "South Under Siege," "Southern by the Grace of God."
Some excerpts:
The United Daughters of the Confederacy renovated and operates the Oakley Park Museum in Edgefield, S.C., of which a 2001 UDC Magazine article explains, "Today it stands as a shrine to the Red Shirt campaign of 1876." Radical neo-Confederate writing is also directed at Unitarians, the LGBT community, Muslims, Hispanics and others. The publications of pro-monument groups such as the Sons of Confederate Veterans incite fear and suspicion for a lengthy list of enemies. We should not be surprised that their publications incite violence and, sadly, we should prepare for more to come.
The 2016 Memorial Service for the 123rd National Convention of the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) in 2016 in Richmond, Virginia was held at the UDC Memorial Building.
No church was willing to host them and the Historic Richmond Foundation didn't rent the UDC the Monumental Church. It seems that writing every last officer of the Historic Richmond Foundation and every sponsor of the Historic Richmond Foundation got them to think a little, probably about their reputations rather than anything involving a moral reflection on what they did.
Also, having corresponded with the Roman Catholic Church, United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church USA, and Episcopalian Church about the issue and with follow up letters answering all their evasions, it seems that for a little while anyways they won't be hosting any Confederate events in Richmond, Virginia. I do want to point out that St. Paul's Episcopal Church was different than the others and extraordinary in their engagement with the moral issues.
As for the Presbyterian Church USA, I am planning to re-read the Gospels to see if Christ passed the bar exam. I have been meaning to, but I have so many things to do.
I have had other projects to do and there is so much work in tracking the neo-Confederate movement. However, I will start writing churches again about hosting. I hope to have more help this year on the issue.
www.templeofdemocracy.com has a section on the Churches of the Confederacy. It needs to be made current which I hope to do in February.
People now days don't know that theories of white supremacy in the former Confederate states precluded that African Americans could do intellectual work including mathematics.
UPDATE: See J.K. Bivins item after the quote. UPDATE2: See Mildred Rutherford item after Bivins item.
There was a book series titled, "The South in the Building of the Nation," which was advertised in the Confederate Veteran and had contributors of leading white Southern scholars. This is extract is from, from the article "The Negro," Volume 7, Chapter 25, pages 530-532. You can read it at this link. The following section was written by H.L. Brock of New York City.
It was the publication of The Southern Historical Publication Society.
When you read the following rubbish you realize why this movie, "Hidden Figures," is important. I have added boldface to the references to mathematics.
In fact, the genuinely intellectual side of the negro,
the power to use the mind independently, to judge,
analyze, combine, is not nourished to any very profit-
able extent on books at all ; rather it thrives on every-
day practical affairs. In every community in the
South and in many in the North, you will find the
shrewd, successful negro or negroid who has these
powers though he cannot sign his name, and along-
THE NEGRO. 531
side of him the college-bred negro, full of parrot
phrases and classroom jargon, utterly lacking the
powers which the other daily exercises. The ex-
plantation seems obvious. The negro is mentally
quite sufficiently developed to use his brain with
effect upon the immediate and the concrete. He is
not sufficiently developed to start with the white
man's generalizations, or more exactly, the formulas
in which these generalizations are expressed, and
work down to the concrete. He is in the class in arithmetic. He is not fit yet for that in algebra and analytics.The capable Booker T. Wash-
ington is in type and in fact exactly like Peter the
successful barber and "Walker who runs a profitable
carrier's business in a certain Southern town, though
neither Peter nor Walker can read or write. It is
Washington's native shrewdness which has made
him what he is, which has enabled him (as did
Walker also) to stand well with the white commun-
ity while he leads the blacks. His knowledge of the
white man's books is incidental. Indeed, it is strict-
ly limited to a small set of simple and purely utili-
tarian chapters. It is the rule of three. Algebra,
Washington does not attempt, nor pretend to con-
noisseurship in the fine art of letters.
Of all the negroes who have essayed books after
the white man's pernicious example, the earliest ex-
hibit, Phyllis Wheatley, was a case of the hot-house
process pure and simple. This slave girl, born in
Africa and brought to Boston at the age of about
eight years in 1761, was kept in a house of one John
Wheatley of that town, and " educated" taught the
trick of verse. Her verses were printed as a curi-
osity at the time and her "Poems" have no other
interest.
It may be said, in fact, that every achievement,
especially every intellectual or literary achievement,
532 HISTOEY OF THE INTELLECTUAL LIFE.
of every negro gets, because it is the achievement
of a negro and as such a curiosity, an amount of ad-
vertising which makes it loom much larger than
life on the contemporary horizon; which must be
discounted in any calm estimate of the intellectual
and literary progress of the race. What is true of
Phyllis Wheatley absolutely, or Douglass largely,
is true to no inconsiderable extent of Booker T.
Washington and DuBois. Both owe a certain part
of their seeming eminence to the quality of rarity
which is the sole distinction of the man with six
fingers. Even Paul Laurence Dunbar (b. Dayton, 0.,
1872; d. 1906, contributor to newspapers in New
York and sometime a member of the staff of the
Library of Congress) admittedly a genuine, though
minor, poet, has a fame quite disproportionate to
his actual place in the catalogue of contemporary
minor poets. He, too, is, in part, a curiosity.
UPDATE HERE:
This is an extract from "Echoes of the Confederacy" by Viola Cobb Bivins, published in 1950 by here and printed in Dallas, Texas by Banks Upshaw and Company. Extract from pages 29-30 in Chapter 3, "How Was The Civilization of the Old South Destroyed." The extract is a condemnation of the 13th Amendment which abolished slavery. Bivins was the president of the Texas Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and her book was meant to instruct the public on the Confederacy, slavery and race. Bivins argues that instead of Reconstruction the control of the freed slaves should have been left to the former slaveholders. She writes:
The would not have given them social equality, for this the Negro did not desire until false friends urged it upon them as a right, and even now the better class of Negro does not desire it. The Negroes would have been given school opportunities befitting the race. They would not have been given instructions in Greek and Latin and higher mathematics,except those desiring to teach and preach, but the majority would have been prepared for life along industrial lines. [Italics in the original.]
I think the copyright of the book has expired. It is a fairly good example on how so-called Confederate heritage is white supremacy and is anti-democratic.
UPDATE2:
Mildred Rutherford was the Historian General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.
At http://www.confederatepastpresent.org you can read an extract from her pamphlet, "The Civilization of the Old South: What Made It: What Destroyed It: What Has Replaced It." It was an address given to the United Daughters of the Confederacy in Dallas, TX Nov. 9, 1916. You can read it at this link. You can see that it is where Bivins got her ideas for her book.
How Was the Civilization of the Old South Destroyed?
PART III.
The XIII. Amendment in 1865 set free in the midst of their former owners nearly 6,000,000 slaves, totally unprepared for freedom and while a factor it was not the greatest factor in destroying the civilization of the South. The men of the Southern army returned to their desolated homes, having taken the oath of allegiance in good faith, and were ready to accept, without a murmur, this amendment when it came.
The planters began to parcel out their land and start their negroes in life as farm tenants. Their affection and interest in their negroes would not only have assured their protection but would have caused their being fed until self-supporting, and other Southern men would have also adjusted themselves to new conditions. Had they then been left untrammelled, matters would have been quickly adjusted. There might have been some friction, but far less than followed under reconstruction policies. The old masters would have helped their faithful negroes to buy homes and to prepare themselves for freedom. The negroes had confidence in their owners and would not have questioned their advice. They could have made better terms under these conditions than were made by false friends under the Freedman’s Bureau.
The men of the South would not have given them civil or political rights until they were prepared for them. They would not have given them social equality, for this the negro did not desire, until false friends from the North urged it upon them as a right, and even then, nor now, do the better class of negroes desire it. The negroes would have been given school opportunities and an education befitting the race would have been given to them. They would not have been given instruction in Greek and Latin and higher mathematics, except to those desiring to teach and to preach, but the majority would have been prepared for life along industrial lines.
[Page 30]
The North, at this time, blundered greatly by allowing Thad Stevens and his Committee to issue the “Exodus Order” which separated the negroes from their old owners, and to place in the South the Freedman’s Bureau with the promise of “forty acres and a mule”—encouraging shiftlessness!
This unwise policy was the real blow aimed at the overthrow of the civilization of the Old South. The men of the South were then put under military discipline which actually tied their hands and only the Ku Klux, the “Chivalry of the Old South,” could break these bonds that fettered them.
The negroes began rapidly, to leave their homes, because; they had been told that they would be kept in slavery still if they did not. Strange negroes came in their stead and the trouble began—for, by the Freedman’s Bureau, the part of the negro was always taken against the whites, whether right or wrong. Men and women who never had done menial work now had to learn, rather than contend with impertinent negroes they had no power to punish. Many had no money to pay for help and the negroes had no desire to work. They were waiting for some one to support them.
The South blundered in allowing the North to supply the teachers for the negro schools. These teachers should have been the white people or the negroes of the South.
“School marms” came down, impressed with the missionary spirit, to help these “poor benighted blacks,” to keep them from being downtrodden and imposed upon, and they gave to them a taste of social equality which spoiled them for service in Southern homes.
One of these teachers invited “Aunt Mandy,” calling her Mrs. Brown, to come in to sit with her, saying she was lonely. “Are you going?” asked “Ole Mis’”
“Law, ‘Ole Mis’ ’, you know I aint goin’! Them white folks that wants me to set with them aint the white folks I wants to set with.”
This was the thought of the aristocratic negro of the Old South.
Mammy, being told that Pres. Roosevelt had invited Booker Washington to lunch with him, said,
“Surely Booker Washington had better manners than to set down to the white folks’ table?”
“No, he didn’t, Mammy, he went in and took lunch with Mr. Roosevelt.”
[Page 31]
“Oh! I am ‘shamed of Booker Washington—his mammy ought to have taught him better manners than that.”
“But, Mammy, suppose it had been you, and Pres. Roosevelt had insisted upon it, what would you have said?”
“Oh! I would have said, ‘Scuse me, Mars Roosevelt, I ain’t hungry.”
And that is just the answer a Southern negro aristocrat would have made. They had an aristocracy just as marked as the whites had, and this aristocracy the whites respected.
Rena was asked to take dinner at the University where her daughter received her diploma. She accepted the invitation but when she found that she was to sit at the table with the white members of the faculty, she slipped out of the room, saying “My little nigger can eat with white folks but I can’t.”
The helplessness of the negro at the time of freedom was pathetic. He was a little child in his dependence. He had no need for money, for he once had supplied to him the things money would buy for his needs, so when he received his money for wages he spent it as a child.
The first driver my father was forced to hire, a year after the surrender, had to be furnished a suit of clothes and hat and shoes before he was presentable on the carriage seat. Yet when he was paid his first month’s wages of $10, $8 was spent for an accordion and the remaining $2 for fire crackers, which like a child he quickly fired.
A Northern man who bought one of the Southern plantations noticed an old negro man helping himself to fire wood. He asked him one day where he bought his wood.
“It’s jest this way,” he answered, “My pa was coachman at the Big House over there, and he pa and he pa so there’s no need for one gentleman to ax another gentleman whar he gits his wood.” “Ole Marster” had always given his wood so this old negro had no idea he was stealing.
That wood was his by right of service from his family was the teaching of the carpetbaggers after the war. To steal from a negro was a great sin, they said, but no sin to steal from white people for all they had the negroes made. The Southern people suffered grievously from this teaching. They saw with real distress how, under false teaching, the negroes were being alienated from them and being harmed, not helped. The negroes under false advisers resented any interference from Southern whites, and the situation became terrible—far worse
[Page 32]
than is pictured in “The Birth of a Nation,” horrible as that is. It was not only a time of real oppression, but also a time of repression, suppression and fearful humiliation. The South lost $2,000,000,000 by loss of slaves together with confiscated and destroyed property. The South was also left with a bonded war debt of $300,000,000.
It is really refreshing to realize, even at this late day, that some of the leading negro leaders are conscious of the mistakes that have been made and are willing to acknowledge it.
A leader named Wilkins, at Little Rock, Ark., in 1915, said on Emancipation Day:
“We are foolish for celebrating, an event which has meant nothing to us but humiliation, persecution, alienation, degradation, obloquy, scorn, and contempt.
We are celebrating a day that never took place and you know it as well as I do.
But some things did take place on that day. Our Southern white friends fed us, clothed us, and administered to us. Let us not forget that, but rather celebrate that. Remember now, those of you who think Lincoln’s Proclamation set us free, that if it did, it was our white friends that kept us from starving.”
Pres. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation never freed the negro nor did Lincoln expect it to. It was a political move against the seceding states to force men at the North to re-enlist, and in the hope that it would make Southern men return to protect their families from negro insurrection and thus end the war, and to induce foreign nations to refuse to acknowledge the Confederacy.
Not a negro in the states that did not secede was freed by Lincoln’s Proclamation and it had no effect even in the South as it was unconstitutional and Lincoln knew it. Many in the North resented it, and Lincoln was unhappy over the situation as Lamon testified. The negroes were freed by an amendment offered by a Southern man and, did not become a law until after Lincoln’s death. It really is a farce for negroes to celebrate Emancipation Day.
By the freedom of the slaves and the estrangements that followed between them and their former owners the civilization of the Old South gradually passed away.
Mark Twain said, “The eight years in America, 1860-1868, uprooted an institution centuries old, and wrought so profoundly upon the national character of the people that the influence will
[Page 33]
be felt for two or three generations.” Mark Twain was a Southern man and knew what he was talking about.
I am going to be asking President-Elect Donald Trump to end presidential and federal government practises that aid neo-Confederacy.
1. Presidents go to the Alfalfa Club events. This is a club that has an annual event based on Robert E. Lee's birthday. I hope that President-Elect Donald Trump doesn't go. Also, this is a club of the elites which he claimed he was going to reject. Trump stated that he was going to drain the swamp, but going to the Alfalfa club would be like diving into the swamp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfalfa_Club
You can read about Robert E. Lee's cruelty, racism and anti-Civil Rights efforts at this blog.
2. Presidents send a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument annually. If Confederate soldiers had succeeded, we wouldn't even have a slogan "Make America Great Again." This monument was built by an organization with a white supremacist agenda, the United Daughters of the Confederacy. This monument serves to glorify an attempt to create a nation whose purpose was to preserve slavery and white supremacy. http://arlingtonconfederatemonument.blogspot.com/
3. The U.S. military academies allow the United Daughters of the Confederacy to present awards there to cadets. It is my hope that President-Elect Donald Trump will not permit this to continue. The United Daughters of the Confederacy glorifies those who would have destroyed America had they succeeded. Had the Confederate leaders that the United Daughters of the Confederacy glorifies succeeded, there would be no America to make great or great again. http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/bowdoin-ends-confederate-heritage-award-like-many-still-offered-by-u-s-service-academies/106066
4. The Junior ROTC programs permit both the involvement of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. It is my hope that President-Elect Donald Trump will not permit this to continue. Had the Confederate leaders that the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Sons of Confederate Veterans glorify succeeded, there would be no America to make great or great again.
In 2015 I wrote a certified letter to Bill Clinton asking him to retract his letters of praise for the United Daughters of the Confederacy. I didn't get a reply.
The letters are published in the "United Daughters of the Confederacy Magazine" as follows:
1. Vol. 57 No. 8, Sept. 1994
2. Vol. 58 No. 2 Feb. 1995
3. Vol. 58 No. 8, Sept. 1995.
I should also say that I am not concerned about the outrage of political partisans of any types and party hacks in particular.
An earlier blog posting with some background information. It also explains why this is important.
The law college at Bowdoin College in Maine has dropped the Jefferson Davis award and is giving the award's endowment back to the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC).
The UDC each year would mention the award and who got it in their magazine. It has been on my to do list to write all the U.S. military service academies asking them to stop working with the UDC. This will be a good article to send along with that letter. Precedent often has an effect on decision making.
However, this event is important for other reasons than that its elimination makes other such awards seem anomalous and a cycle which works to make the Confederacy less and less legitimate as the elimination of one thing leads to the elimination of other Confederate things.
This is the effect on the UDC itself. As the award is rejected, the UDC is rejected. Giving the award to Bowdoin College gave the UDC prestige with its membership. Rejection not only reduces one item for which annually the giving of the award was also giving the UDC prestige. There is an old saying, "We honor others to honor ourselves." I am not sure it is always true, but with UDC their giving an award was always self-promotional.
As the UDC finds its awards rejected it loses prestige among its members.
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
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