Arkansas bill to drop Robert E. Lee holiday goes to governor for signature

http://www.swtimes.com/news/20170318/arkansas-king-lee-bill-sent-to-governor

The bill if signed, and Governor Asa Hutchison is planning on signing it Monday in a ceremony, will remove Robert E. Lee from the state's Jan. 19th holiday which will be for Martin Luther King.

As the article points out that leaves only Alabama, Mississippi having a Robert E. Lee/ Martin Luther King holiday combined.

As the article points out there used to be seven states with Lee/King combined holidays.

Some Republicans in the state legislature came up with various excuses to not change the holiday without endorsing the Confederacy. This has been a strategy of late to defend the glorification of the Confederacy by having rationalizations that don't specifically defend the Confederacy but find some reason or another for the Confederate monument to stay, the Confederate holiday to be retained, and the street or building named after a Confederate not to be renamed.

I am sort of surprised that this has happened. It could be that with the massacre in 2015 some state legislators wanted to do something to further de-Confederate their state.

It might be though that the Lee holiday  came up in trying to attract a factory, facility, or business headquarters to Arkansas. Some competing site just needs to point out that they have a Confederate holiday and it would give pause to families wondering what type of state to which they would be moving. Competing sites probably would like to bring a place's Confederate identity to attention as a means of blocking the other sites chances of locating a corporate facility.

I don't think a corporation's non-discrimination policy is worth much if they don't consider the issue of the Confederate self-identification of a place to which they wish to locate a facility.

I think at some point I should ask corporations to consider this and give it some weight.

Martin Luther King statue at Stone Mountain

The Stone Mountain Association wants to put up a Martin Luther King statue at Stone Mountain.

Here is an article on the proposal:

http://politics.blog.ajc.com/2015/10/11/a-monument-to-mlk-will-crown-stone-mountain/

I think it is a fairly obvious tactic to preserve Confederate monuments. Tack on some monument to an African American nearby and blab on about diversity and tolerance and acknowledgement or whatever.

The leadership in the African American community sees this obvious ploy and has objected to it.

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-stone-mountain-martin-luther-king-20151013-story.html

What is interesting is the Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans' response to the proposed monument.

http://gascv.org/scv-responds-to-attempt-to-place-mlk-statue-on-stone-mountain/

From the Georgia SCV press release:

The Georgia Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans responded today to the proposal by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association to erect a monument to MLK, former black civil rights activist. This decision by the Stone Mountain Memorial Association is wholly inappropriate in that it is an intentional act of disrespect toward the stated purpose of the Stone Mountain memorial from its inception as well as a possible violation of the law which established the Stone Mountain Memorial Association and charged it with promoting the mountain as a Confederate memorial.

Besides showing that the Georgia SCV is none too bright, it also quickly dissipates all their efforts to moderated their image by parading about H.K. Edgerton, making up mythologies about Black Confederate soldiers, and talking about "Heritage Not Hate."

It is always gratifying to see the opposition shoot themselves in the foot.

John Shelton Reed's seeming conspiracy against Martin Luther King

In 1995 I was indexing issues of Chronicles magazine, a publication of the Rockford Institute in Rockford, Illinois. The Rockford Institute had a campaign to discredit Martin Luther King. Up until about the mid-1990s John Shelton Reed contributed articles to Chronicles magazine where his homophobia was rather upfront and his racial attitudes were very very thinly veiled.

It turns out that sections of King's dissertations are copied from other works. At the time of the discovery in 1990 King was dead and so was the dissertation advisor.

What is interesting is that John Shelton Reed played a very key role in helping the Rockford Institute attack Martin Luther King. The articles in Chronicles also attacked Boston University and administrators there. So I wrote Peter Woods to find out more.

The following is an extract from the letter to me from Peter Wood, Provost of Boston University, July 19, 1995, which I have permission to use which shows the role of John Shelton Reed who is referred to as Dr. Reed.  Reed is an academic with a Ph.D.

Although you cannot rebut the substance of the allegations, there is probably something worth saying about the tactics and motives of Mr. Fleming, Dr. Reed, and their collaborators. When Dr. Reed wrote to Boston University President John Silber in May 1990 alleging that Dr. King committed plagiarism in his doctoral dissertation, he cited no source, offered no evidence, and made no specific claims. From Dr. Reed's letter, it was impossible to tell in in [if] Dr. King was being accused of plagiarizing two words, two paragraphs, or the whole dissertation, and he offered no clue as to whom Dr. King had allegedly plagiarized. 

 John Shelton Reed's essay in Chronicles some months latter repeated this technique of broadside allegation, so vague as to be uncheckable, but presented in a manner that suggested that it was a well-established fact. In retrospect, it appears that neither Dr. Reed nor Mr. Fleming had any real evidence, but Dr. Reed knew from his service at a National Endowment for the Humanities reviewer (where he apparently saw a confidential report from Dr. Carson about King's plagiarism) that there was something to hunt for. The trick was to avoid violating NEH confidentiality by dropping hints and hoping Boston University would make the discovery on its own. 

Perhaps there was more to it than that, but that is my best guess as to why Chronicles developed the story in such an odd manner before the article in The Wall Street Journal on November 9, 1990, in which clear and specific allegations and evidence were for the first time presented to the public. So much for tactics.

King is not honored because he was a great academic, but for his courage and vision in leading the civil rights movement. However, the neo-Confederates hoped to discredit King with this information. John Shelton Reed was working with them to do this.

It also shows the impact when neo-Confederates are placed in cultural institutions and bodies.