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.