“I do declare the reason why Dallas is removing all its silly ol’ Civil War statues is because the mayor is a Yankee.”
Old times not forgotten
Angry protests can erupt when the ruling leaders do not have deep roots in the soil they now call home. A Dallas media poll revealed the majority (70%) supported waiting to remove Confederate Civil War statues. Then an African American news correspondent remarked those statues in public parks and spaces make him feel uncomfortable and he should stay away. Whites would say hogwash; blacks would say amen, so different is the American experience among the races.
I’m not sure how the plight to remove every Civil War statue from the South became a big, loud deal, but here we are in 2017 with much bigger fish to fry. The economy, public education, worldwide terrorism and possible nuclear war can take a back seat to the hottest protests in America. What started this movement against Confederate Civil War statues, things no one black or white thought about or looked at for decades?
Maybe it has been the constant reenactments of Civil War battles. Maybe it’s because former slaves were never given what was promised to each and every one, 40 acres and a mule, if history records accurately. Maybe it’s because African Americans were treated like second-class citizens for a good century after the Civil War, even with the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 mandating everybody living in America is free and enslaved by no one. Maybe it’s because of the brutal yet legal reign of the KKK in the early 20th century. Maybe it’s because laws like Civil Rights in 1964 had to be passed; racial segregation had to be abolished; public schools had to be integrated; neighborhoods, employers, businesses had to be federally warned against discriminating based on race. Maybe it’s because Martin Luther King Jr. Day is not a recognized and honored holiday across the nation city by city. Maybe it’s because of the Black Lives Matter movement, sparked by on-camera deadly shootings of blacks by almost always white officers. Maybe it’s because DNA has exonerated dozens of black men wrongfully imprisoned and undoubtedly means some were executed for crimes they did not commit. Maybe it’s because the largest gang in America is made up of whites not blacks or Hispanics. Maybe it’s because of the African American church massacre in South Carolina by a Confederate flag-waving self-proclaimed white racist.
That damn war
I didn’t know or remember my parents and I don’t see eye to eye on the Civil War’s outcome. One day I brought up the movement to remove the Confederate flag still flown in some Southern states. I compared it to Germany losing WWII. The Nazi flags were removed, summarily illegal to display. It was a punishment. They had lost the war. I implied the South lost the Civil War and the Confederate flag never should have been allowed to fly again. “We did NOT lose that war,” my parents told me. “We” I pondered my parents saying. What a bond to the past yet somehow lost on my generation. My parents were born into the Depression Era. At the time “Gone With the Wind” showed on the silver screen in Atlanta, Georgia, and any black actors in the movie (and there were lots of them) were not allowed to attend the Hollywood gala opening. Isn’t that incredible? It is even more incredible that the lessons from America’s Civil War, still our most deadliest because all who died were Americans, are not agreed upon by historians and especially those of us from the South.
Southerners were taught no one won the Civil War; both sides lost. Modern Northerners don’t think that way at all. And the Civil War was not only and just about slavery but a whole list of other grievances against Northern aggression, we Texans were taught in school. Here’s a non-slavery list of causes for the Civil War, according to Wikipedia: partisan politics, abolitionism, Southern nationalism, Northern nationalism, expansionism, economics and modernization.
In the 1860s during a political debate, Abraham Lincoln asked his challenger if he still supported slavery. Lincoln held a mirror to society, which had included and begun with our nation’s very own forefathers like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners. Lincoln saw slavery as immoral. Yet Southern commerce and culture were ingrained in racial segregation. Really it was about cheap labor and the inability to see a people who hailed from Africa as human beings.
Incredulously, Lincoln considered sending former slaves back to Africa, anything to preserve the Union. History—like mankind—is messy, violent, unjust, cruel, contradictory and often less than truthful. More recently President Barack Obama, trying to come to some compromise about the growing controversy over Confederate hero statues, suggested displaying them in museums but still removing them from public places.
Slavery and racism is the story of America. It’s our past, our present, and apparently our foreseeable future. Education that includes a lot of world history may enlighten some to see slavery wasn’t created by America but throughout human history had been spoils of war and a fact of life when one nation took over another. Maybe that revelation could ease tensions and alleviate the need to maintain anger about the past—our collective bloody, horrible, bigoted, prejudiced, shameful entwined history. Where does my generation fit into all of this? Well, we were the kids who went to school with and befriended others from different races and backgrounds. It was the 1970s—and for a brief shining moment we were living The Dream.