{"id":523308,"date":"2010-04-11T08:16:00","date_gmt":"2010-04-11T12:16:00","guid":{"rendered":"tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-16711557.post-7456950622243258595"},"modified":"2010-04-11T08:16:26","modified_gmt":"2010-04-11T12:16:26","slug":"southern-discomfort-racism-the-confederacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/523308","title":{"rendered":"Southern Discomfort: Racism & The Confederacy"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
Illustration Depicting the Fort Pillow Massacre in Southwest Tennessee During 1864 Where Black Union Soldiers, Refugees and White Officers Were Slaughtered on the Orders of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest<\/a>
Originally uploaded by panafnewswire<\/a><\/span><\/div>\n

April 11, 2010
Op-Ed Contributor<\/p>\n

Southern Discomfort<\/p>\n

By JON MEACHAM
New York Times<\/p>\n

IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren went on assignment for Life magazine, traveling throughout the South after the Supreme Court\u2019s school desegregation decisions. Racism was thick, hope thin. Progress, Warren reported, was going to take a while \u2014 a long while. \u201cHistory, like nature, knows no jumps,\u201d he wrote, \u201cexcept the jump backward, maybe.\u201d<\/p>\n

Last week, Virginia\u2019s governor, Robert McDonnell, jumped backward when he issued a proclamation recognizing April as Confederate History Month. In it he celebrated those \u201cwho fought for their homes and communities and Commonwealth\u201d and wrote of the importance of understanding \u201cthe sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War.\u201d<\/p>\n

The governor originally chose not to mention slavery in the proclamation, saying he \u201cfocused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.\u201d It seems to follow that, at least for Mr. McDonnell, the plight of Virginia\u2019s slaves does not rank among the most significant aspects of the war.<\/p>\n

Advertently or not, Mr. McDonnell is working in a long and dispiriting tradition. Efforts to rehabilitate the Southern rebellion frequently come at moments of racial and social stress, and it is revealing that Virginia\u2019s neo-Confederates are refighting the Civil War in 2010. <\/p>\n

Whitewashing the war is one way for the right \u2014 alienated, anxious and angry about the president, health care reform and all manner of threats, mostly imaginary \u2014 to express its unease with the Age of Obama, disguising hate as heritage.<\/p>\n

If neo-Confederates are interested in history, let\u2019s talk history. Since Lee surrendered at Appomattox, Confederate symbols have tended to be more about white resistance to black advances than about commemoration. In the 1880s and 1890s, after fighting Reconstruction with terrorism and after the Supreme Court struck down the 1875 Civil Rights Act, states began to legalize segregation. <\/p>\n

For white supremacists, iconography of the \u201cLost Cause\u201d was central to their fight; Mississippi even grafted the Confederate battle emblem onto its state flag.<\/p>\n

But after the Supreme Court allowed segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, Jim Crow was basically secure. There was less need to rally the troops, and Confederate imagery became associated with the most extreme of the extreme: the Ku Klux Klan.<\/p>\n

In the aftermath of World War II, however, the rebel flag and other Confederate symbolism resurfaced as the civil rights movement spread. In 1948, supporters of Strom Thurmond\u2019s pro-segregation Dixiecrat ticket waved the battle flag at campaign stops.<\/p>\n

Then came the school-integration rulings of the 1950s. Georgia changed its flag to include the battle emblem in 1956, and South Carolina hoisted the colors over its Capitol in 1962 as part of its centennial celebrations of the war.<\/p>\n

As the sesquicentennial of Fort Sumter approaches in 2011, the enduring problem for neo-Confederates endures: anyone who seeks an Edenic Southern past in which the war was principally about states\u2019 rights and not slavery is searching in vain, for the Confederacy and slavery are inextricably and forever linked.<\/p>\n

That has not, however, stopped Lost Causers who supported Mr. McDonnell\u2019s proclamation from trying to recast the war in more respectable terms. They would like what Lincoln called our \u201cfiery trial\u201d to be seen in a political, not a moral, light. If the slaves are erased from the picture, then what took place between Sumter and Appomattox is not about the fate of human chattel, or a battle between good and evil. It is, instead, more of an ancestral skirmish in the Reagan revolution, a contest between big and small government.<\/p>\n

We cannot allow the story of the emancipation of a people and the expiation of America\u2019s original sin to become fodder for conservative politicians playing to their right-wing base. That, to say the very least, is a jump backward we do not need.<\/p>\n

Jon Meacham, the editor of Newsweek, won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for biography for \u201cAmerican Lion: Andrew Jackson in the White House.\u201d
<\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Illustration Depicting the Fort Pillow Massacre in Southwest Tennessee During 1864 Where Black Union Soldiers, Refugees and White Officers Were Slaughtered on the Orders of Confederate General Nathan Bedford ForrestOriginally uploaded by panafnewswire April 11, 2010Op-Ed Contributor Southern Discomfort By JON MEACHAMNew York Times IN 1956, nearly a century after Fort Sumter, Robert Penn Warren […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4243,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-523308","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523308","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4243"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=523308"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/523308\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=523308"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=523308"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=523308"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}