Should Billy Graham statue replace Confederate in Raleigh NC?

   I say No. Not a Hell No , but No

   Billy like us all was complicated and full of contradictions. Witness Nixon in Knoxville a couple weeks after Kent State in 1970 when Al Gore's father was not invited.

     Read Steven Miller's book on Nixon and Graham and Will D. Campbell's reservations in the 60s. Campbell has a plaza named in his honor at Ole Miss and should have monuments elsewhere. John Lewis loved Will D Campbell and Billy Gee's definitive biographer Marshall Frady adored Will Campbell.

    Billy's son Franklin guest list for Billy's 95th birthday in Charlotte were Donald Trump and wife, Roger Ailes and Rupert Murdoch of Fox News.

    See what Frye Gaillard has written about Graham, also google Randall Balmer on Billy Graham and the judgments of History.

    Chowan College rcently took down Jesse Helms name off their activities center. Bill Friday the chancellor of the UNC system in the last quarter of the 20th century was aware of Helms role in the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention and the nefarious reverberations for North Carolina and the South East. He said Helms fundamentalism takeover of the Baptist seminary in the town of Wake Forest in 1987 was especially ominous.

     Louisville Baptist seminary president Al Mohler told Bonhoeffer biographer Charles Marsh of UVA most folks were unaware what a key and enthusiastic role Billy had encouraging the fundamentalist takeover forces of WA Criswell where Billy's FBC Dallas membership was most of his life.

   The same Criswell who told Baptist preachers in 56 in Columbia SC you wouldn't call a chigger and chiggerow, now would you.

    Graham has a monument in Charlotte, the family farm barn. It is great museum for him. He is not worthy to be honored by the secular state in Raleigh.

    Maybe Dean Smith, another Baptist, or George W. Truett who was born in Hayesville, but not Billy Graham.

    We are all tarnished, damaged goods, but Billy doesnt make the cut.

John Lewis versus "BY God" Tommy Tubberville on Gun Control

      John Lewis died today. I met him twice, once in Atlanta and then again in 2012 to march across the Selma Bridge with Ethel Kennedy. I was back in 2015 with Barack Obama And George W. Bush 43.

    I didn't see Tommy Tubberville there either time. I guess he was in Florida or Arkansas.

   When Tommy defeated Sessions Tuesday night he grabbed a microphone and said "By God let them Come to Alabama and try and take our guns."

    Asa Carter who wrote Wallace's Gauntlet Segregation Now and Forever January 63 speech had Tommy's back on that utterance.

    Doing so Tommy the super trumper threw in against Martin Luther King Jr and the Civil Rights era, Nick Saban and his BLM video with his Crimson Tide, Bonhoeffer and Oscar Romero to boot. Tommy joined Lee Atwater's legacy in his "nigger" memo of 1983 he and his staff can hear in the 25th minute of Du Vernay's documentary 13th about the amendment.

    Of course Tubberville is not alone. Dabo Swinney's congressman Jeff Duncan, a founding member of the second Amendment Caucus in Upstate SC is with him and Ainsworth.

    Today on NBC this morning spotlighted Lewis and a house delegation against guns after the shooting in Orlando. Lewis understands what Marion Hammer did in Florida with the Stand your Ground law that most likely led to the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the unrest that followed this year. He understands what the forces backing Tubberville and Will Ainsworth and his Eagle Forum movement do to the extended families of the people of color who play football in the SEC.

   Nick Saban understands.  Tubberville does not.

    Will the SBC of Alabama do something? How about Richard Shelby and the Honors program and the Legends in Tuscaloosa.

     Saban gets it. Calpurnia and Wayne Flynt and Mark Wilson of Jennifer Wilkins Auburn University Democracy Project gets it.

    Who else gets it in Alabama. The Vote will tell in November.

Cherokee County History Museum Hall of Fame

    Lot of activity recently on Pam Melton Cazel facebook page about a Gaffney Hall of Fame. Cody Sossamon had a front page interview in the Ledger Wednesday with Roger Harris I have yet to read because of the Pay Wall.

   But I have read Tommy Martin's 83 or so column about the Gaffney greats to that date, the HOF of Gaffney High as Granard didn't come over till summer of 68.

    That's  a good list to start with. I don't know much at all about Blacksburg's tradition so I am blind there.

    But here are my 20 nominees for the inaugural class. Starting with People of Color as they had a tradition too before integration.

   For historical and foundational purposes I think the inagural class should focus on 80 and earlier. And I understand this to be all athletes just not football players.



    That said:

    1. Charles Foster, Olympic hurdler Montreal 1976, GHS 71


      2. Ulyssees Dawkins, Great Quarter back at Granard who Roger Harris himself said was easily one of the best athletes in Gaffney in the 60s, outstanding in baseball and basketball as well.

     Willie Jeffries. The Legendary Granard Coach

     4. Johnny Dawkins, pivotal figure in the integration of the public schools who was president of the Student chapter of the NAACP and became award winning screenwriter in LA

     5. Donnie Ray Littlejohn Phenom receiver and defensive back and baseball player who married Elnora

      6. Bob Prevatte

      7 Wayne Whiteside

       8Roger Harris

     9 Joe Wren great athlete who Coach Whiteside told me with Johnny Dawkins the two best athletes of character and integrity he coached.

     10 Rodney Camp Took the Indians to three state chamipionships

    11 Sidney Rice. Check his Wiki Page. And coulda played basketball in addition to football at South Carolina

    12 Billy Ray Rice. Baseball, Football and my Dad performed his wedding

     13 Tim Childers

    14 Benny Lemmons and or his Brother Mac

     15Earl Clary

    16 Louis Sossamon

    I'll stop there. In years to come Tommy Martin's great book on the History of Gaffney Football honored by Max Prep as one of the top 100 programs all time nationally can take the county HOF through the decades since 80.

    But here are my inaugural nominees

Can Dan Cathy and Tyler Perry Save Atlanta; Or Will Mohler SBC Populism be worse Than Sherman

   Friends as  with other blogs come back to this one as this rough draft and post will need further work.

    Dan Cathy of Chic Fil a was in religion class with me at Furman the fall of 1971 and his father was named for George W Truett the greatest Baptist of the first half of the 20th Century.  I was baptized in the Truett church in Hayesville NC where Truett was born.

    I've never met Tyler Perry but have a film script set in Georgia in the late 60s with a scene at Stone Mtn and one with Janis Joplin at the Atlanta Pops Festival of July 5 1969 I would love for him to help me produce. And then there is another idea low budget for one of the two men who join MLK in bust in Westminster Abbey.

      But there has been an avalanche of speculation lately about Baptist populism and Black Lives Matter. Cathy was the subject of a piece in the Christian Post where he paneled with a rapper in Atlanta who wanted some stock in Chic Fil A instead of Dan shining his shoes. And Al Mohler who was in Atlanta for a few years as editor of the state Baptist paper the Christian Index where he pretty much sabotaged a decade that could have made it much more likely Georgia never woulda gone Doug Collins, Bryan Kemp and Trump to champion anti abortion tribe mindset among Baptists instead of furthering the conversations of Jimmy Carter and his predecessor Harwell on Race Relations.
 Now Mohler is subject of recent interview in New Yorker where he endorses Trump and lays George Floyd and the BLM protests at the feet of a baptist populism that he says is outside his jurisdiction as a theologian.

   I think MLKing and Bonhoeffer would beg to differ.

   Which brings up the great Atlantic Piece on why white Baptist preachers reach out to the local black pastors when there is a racial killing only to have the intermittent enthusiams for reform brick walled on the abortion issue where from FBC Spartanburg SC to Unity Baptist number two in Alabama ( more specifically FBC Williams Alabama of the June 13 Sunday front page profile in NY Times). 

    Lee Atwater wanted it so. He is quoted in Wuthnow's Rough Country about how Baptist fundamentalism shaped the modern day Republican Party. And I think to better effect his same "NWord" memo is on his own lips in Duvernay's documentary 13th now on Netflix. If you want to get right to it, fast forward to minute 25.

    According to Tom Edsall whose easily googled piece Audacity of Hate, Nytimes earlier this year will google right up, in 1984 Atwater wrote a memo to the Reagan Bush committee saying in the south you have three groups, the old Country club Democrats now reliably Republicans, the Blacks, reliably democrat and the white populists ( or you could call them southern baptists). The white working class populists resent the wealth and power of the CC Republican, but hold great antipathy toward blacks. Atwater said they are the Trump card in the game of politics in the south.

    Well you look at Harold Bloom on Southern Baptists in American Religion and he says the Tragedy of the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC is the result of political machinations that massquerade as religious conviction.

   He said that in 1993. 

   Also in the early 90s Bill Friday, the chancellor of the UNC system and popular weekend personality on UNCTV told Cecil Sherman, key founder of the resistance movement to the fundamentalist takeover of the SBC the most important event of the 80s decade in North Carolina was the takeover by fundamentalists of the Seminary in the town of Wake Forest, Southeastern. Friday said Jesse Helms network to Pressler and Patterson of the Council for National policy was a strategic move. Because according to Friday they knew at SEBTS they could turn the screws and get in the head of every Baptist preacher graduate to fill the pulpits in the suburbs and hamlets of North Carolina and beyond to become card carrying advocates for the politicized issues of abortion, prayer in schools and distorted 2nd amendment rights to add to the residue of coded race baiting.

      In 1990 Pressler had become livid when there was chatter from the floor of the convention about a rumored 100 thousand dollar donation from the Helms folks to the takeover cause. Pressler had been asked about it in 1988 in the presence of Nancy Ammerman in San Antonio.

    So the Scholar Mohler one of Time Magazine's top 50 under 40 just a decade ago to shape the future, ain't all he seemed to be cut out to be.

    And my friend Dan Cathy is on a learning curve as well though he's done great with his Dad's recipe and I'm delighted he has as I was fortunate to be one his select 100 free meals weekly for a year when his unit in Ft Payne Alabama opened three years ago.

   My apologies for being scattershot but Ive laid out the background reading material for you and will attempt to be a little more erudite on the edit.

   I'm already thinking of what Joseph Oneill said over Christmas in the NY R of Books No More Nice Dems.

   And Keep an eye on Alabama if its Tubberville vs Doug Jones. It will be as if George himself had a 68 do over with Albert Brewer or the virtues of Judge Frank Johnson.

    I think Nick Saban has already declared for Doug Jones in his Utube video with his football team. If BLM matters as Saban says they do, then Donald Trump owes the SEC an apology for his SOB Statement not to mention Trevor Lawrence and Darien Rencher at Clemson and Tubs will never ask Trump to apologize for anything. Dartmouth's Randall Balmer is with me on this in his Can Football Save America piece. Google than one too.

    Sad that the Baptist convention of Alabama is sittin this one out while a Catholic from Tuscaloosa has made his stand.

My Mommas 97th today shared with Bush 43's 74th

     It never registered with me till today that Momma shared the same birthday with Dubya.

    I like Dubya just never thought he shoulda been president. I saw the movie. Proud of him for showing up with Laura and Barack and Michelle in Selma in 2015 but Dick Cheney and the War in Iraq were disasters.

    I knew Momma better than Dubya so gonna talk about her now. I have blogged before about her getting her name in the Atlanta Constitution before I did; come to think of it I still haven't so still in the Never did column.

   And I confess there were decades even when she was disappointed in my failure to fulfill my promise at least in conventional terms, but there were decades maybe the first two and then the last one, that gives me thirty years where I think she was proud.

   I know in my heart she was proud of the phone call I made to My Friend Four this morning on her 97th.

     Daddy told me a few years after Momma died after his first month or so of sermons at Bethel outside Newport Tn, She came to him and said "Billy, if that's the best you can do we're gonna have a rough row to hoe."

     Thomas Barksdale liked that story.

     Got me to thinking about how Andy Gunn and our Mormon Friend Mark Poole  finished our academic career at Gaffney High. Miss Chadwick gave us an academic year to read six short stories. With about three weeks to go the three of us were about ten or eleven behind.

    Momma opened up the Baptist church for us to have focussed study for our delinquency on reading and writin.

    We all got em in and I think Momma typed mine. If not Miss Chadwick woulda had a cease and desist of the three of the top ten grads that year and woulda been a disaster as my Most Intellectual picture was already in the annual.

     There is a cartoon picture somewhere around the house of a woman in a 50s skirt with a baseball glove behind a 2nd base little leaguer deep in the infield. She has her glove open just in case and the kid says, I got it Mom.

    That was my Momma

Ignorance, Monuments, History education and the DAC

  Friends come back to this blog in a few days for some editing and refined thoughts. I'm in major REEform mode this morning and this one matters.

   I talked to a staffer this morning for SC Senator Tim Scott and two days ago a staffer for Eric Mackey ths state school superintendent for Alabama. He is a graduate of Sand Rock HS about 7 miles from Collinsville and his extended family overlaps with some deacons and folks who have made a career in education in Collinsville.

   For some who may be reading my blog for the first time, My Mother was baptized in Collinsville and that side of the family goes back to the 1840s there in South Dekalb County. My Grandfather Jordan, born 1881, ran as a Lincoln Republican for School supe of Dekalb County in the second decade of the 20th Century and was soundly defeated.

     I am gonna name some names to dedicate this blog in the second version so come back for that.

     This morning I told Scott's office would be a grand idea given Nick Saban's video with his linemen recently produced and Dabo's testimony June 13 at the BLM march at Bowman field--see most recent blog--would be grand if sometime this winter the two teams meet in Montgomery for a tour of Bryan Stevenson's lynching museum.  Ole Miss may join them or come later as it was the speculation 5 star black recruits at Ole Miss and Miss St may walk if the Confederate Flag didnt come down.

    The legislature met and to paraphrase or appropiriate Oh Brother Where Art thou, the White Brethren came around to some version of the notion: "These boys are serious."

      I Also am adamant as I told Scott's office every honors HS or College Prep history class in the public schools of SC and Alabama--wouldn't hurt for gun totin Bryan Kemp in Georgia to bone up a little too--have ten days to study the Civil War without the distortions of the Daughters of the Confederacy. That would include two days set aside to view carefully the Henry Louis Gates excellent two hours on Reconstruction as has been available on Public Television PBS for two years now. I saw a repeat just yesterday. Wilmington Riots, the DAC, the Lost Cause, The Minstrel Shows and the Two Real Coons, lynching, all there.

  As I will share this with Republican operative of Plainview HS Jordan Doufexis and our friend the Dekalb School supe Jason Barnett, wouldn't hurt for Momma's Dekalb County to set an example to strongly invite the school board members there and across the state to bone up with a little remedial education to not only include Ed Bridges excellent chapter on the Civil War in his Bicentennial History of the State, but also Jill Lepore's excellent recent history of America These Truths; and for those who want to go to the top of the class Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams, recommended to me by Radcliffe's Dean and Furman grad, former History Teacher at Harvard and UVA, Tomiko Brown Nagin.

    I will attempt to get this to Lt Gov Will Ainsworth as well and another recent Furman grad Clayte Hubbard, son of former Speaker of the House, Mike a friend of Bo Jackson and Herschel Walker.

   Update on july 6 I called My Friend Four in Greenville SC with reservations about Trump's protest ads and asked them and every Republican who calls themself a Christian and has a clue what it means to look at those ads and ask themselves if Trump is not playing a Lee Atwater race card shined up a little as revealed in the 25th minute of the documentary 13th, the voting rights amendment. Produced by DuVernay, the same woman who did Selma.....

   If not today I'm gonna post here Frye Galliard's thoughts on monuments from two days ago. Frye has street Cred. His path has intersected that of Bobby Kennedy, Will Campbell, Carlyle Marney and Johnny Cash over the years not to mention Gaffney's Jerry Shinn and Furman's Sam Hodges.

    So come back soon

    Quoting from June 27 facebook post of Frye Galliard


      I'm going to wade in here on a subject that I probably should not. I understand and support the abhorrence by Black Lives Matter activists and their allies - of which I am one - for monuments that glorify Confederates, racists, and the cause of white supremacy. None of this should be glorified.

I speak (for friends out there who do not know) as a journalist/historian who has spent most of my career writing about civil rights and racial injustice. I speak also as the descendant of slave-owners, and more recently, as the son and grandson of men and women who supported, less and less certainly in the course of their lives, the cause of white supremacy and segregation. This is a cause I abhor.

What I have wrestled with over the years is the ability of good people - people I knew to possess many decent and admirable qualities - to believe in hideous and indecent things. During the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, I wrote a short book called Journey to the Wilderness, later adapted as a documentary film, about the Civil War letters written by ancestors of mine who fought for the Confederacy. Those letters are filled, not with the sense of a glorious Lost Cause, but with reflections on loss and bloodshed and pain. I concluded that the Civil War, measured by these real-time descriptions, was a terrible American tragedy with only one beneficial outcome - the end of slavery. (I suppose we could add the preservation of the Union.)

And so I understand the feeling of the descendants of slaves who abhor monuments to the Confederacy erected to glorify white supremacy. And make no mistake, that is why most of these monuments were erected, for they appeared at a time when lynching was rampant, and Jim Crow laws were being established, and African Americans were being stripped of the vote. A shameful time in American history.

And yet... I have to admit that I wince when some of the journalists I most admire - Chris Hayes and Lawrence O'Donnell, for example, of MSNBC - dismiss the PEOPLE behind these monuments with terms like "racist traitors." Yes, they were racists; so were most white Americans, including many abolitionists who hated the institution of slavery, but very often doubted the moral and intellectual equality of black Americans. And yes, legally, they were traitors to the Union. But I have always winced at terms that dehumanize, that fail to capture the tragic complexity of the human condition.

When I read today that Princeton University, the alma mater of President Woodrow Wilson, had stripped his name from the school at the university to which it was attached, I confess that I had mixed feelings. Yes, of course, Woodrow Wilson was a racist. More virulent, in fact, than most. He arranged for a private showing at the White House of the film Birth of a Nation, which glorified the Ku Klux Klan. As the great Jelani Cobb has written, this fact alienated African American students at Princeton when they saw Wilson's name honored and glorified. Of course it did.

But there is also this. Woodrow Wilson was one of three American presidents to win the Nobel Peace Prize. (Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter were the other two; and Carter, who should have received it for his role in the Camp David Peace Accords, only won the recognition as ex-president.) Wilson also was one of the foremost proponents of the League of Nations - forerunner of the United Nations - in hopes of finding a way to resolve international disputes without war in the wake of the carnage of WWI. And Wilson was also the American president who renounced imperialism as a cornerstone of American foreign policy.

What are we to do with these complexities? What are we to do with the fact that in his day, one of the most prominent opponents of Confederate memorials was Robert E. Lee? What do we do with the fact that the author of the words, "All men are created equal" owned slaves. I worry that in our rush to tear down monuments, we are tearing down the human complexity of our history. Maybe it's a casualty of the times. I understand that this is not my moment. I am an old white guy, and all of us should understand the pervasive oppressiveness of white privilege, and the pain and rage that it induces.

But I do believe in the peril of misunderstanding our common humanity. More substantially, I worry that the eradication of memorials and monuments will distract us from the much harder work that needs to be done - the dismantling of systemic racism in so many facets of American life: from policing, to health care, to the suppression of the vote, and thus the subversion of our democracy. This is a hard and promising time, so full of danger and so full of hope. We will see where it take us.

Other views are welcome.