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You are here: Home / Politics / An Unexamined Scandal / Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The Proper Commemoration of “Confederate Memorial Day”

Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The Proper Commemoration of “Confederate Memorial Day”

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One of those “just in the family” things they don’t talk about in front of the Yankees, apparently, because I don’t remember hearing about it before. This year’s commemoration gets a more fitting memorial. Angela Helm, at The Root:

On Monday, Alabama is set to observe Confederate Memorial Day, commemorating the sons of the South killed in the U.S. Civil War. No surprise there. Alabama loves fighting with Mississippi for the title of “most racist state” (though they actually may be running neck and neck with “everything south of the Canadian border” if we’re keeping it real).

I find this amusing, not just because of the abiding ridiculousness of the holiday itself—which for me and most black people is a dressed-up way of reveling in institutional racism and anti-blackness (contrary to claims of “love of heritage”)—but because I just so happen to be in Alabama today, Monday, for a press preview of a memorial and museum dedicated to those both forgotten and annihilated through acts of racial terror across the country, and I will touch this holiest site on … Confederate Memorial Day…

… [H]ere in America, the God some trust is not on the dollar bill, it is the dollar bill. Here, as we all were whispered songs of “sweet lands of liberty,” black Americans perished in a nightmare of running blood and burning flesh and mass rape for pleasure and profit; that story all but erased from history and replaced with men playing war games, re-enacting so-called acts of valor for an indefensible premise…

The national lynching memorial, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, will stand atop a hill, in remembrance of the more than 4,000 victims of racial terror on U.S. soil, which the Montgomery, Ala.-based Equal Justice Institute has meticulously tracked for six years.

The accompanying Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, located in a former slave warehouse, will also tell the tale of our sojourn here: from enslavement to widespread public executions, to Jim Crow, to the continued violence against black bodies through mass incarceration and police violence.

The museum and memorial are but two drops in a bucket recognizing the true “legacy” of this nation; it’s a befitting tribute to those who weren’t able to throw up statues and establish holidays, their bodies sometimes snatched and ripped apart for keepsakes. It finally acknowledges, in a lasting way, what this country wrought upon its literal children, drafted into another war they never signed up for, but one in which they certainly perished, strange fruit hanging from poplar trees…

 
Fred Hiatt, in the Washington Post:

In the Riverfront Park of this state capital, you will find a series of panels depicting the city’s history. They will tell you when the first white settler arrived, how riverboats transformed Montgomery into a trading hub for cotton “and many other important commodities,” and how the city became the cradle of the Confederacy.

They will not tell you that the most important of those other commodities was human beings.

It is the sort of lacuna, says Bryan Stevenson, that allows people to “achieve political victories by celebrating the greatness of America.”

“The question is, which decade are black Americans supposed to want to relive?”

It also is a gap that is about to be filled in the most dramatic fashion just a few blocks from the riverfront, beginning Thursday. That is when the Equal Justice Initiative, which Stevenson founded and heads, will open the Legacy Museum and, nearby, an equally powerful, even more unusual outdoor memorial to the thousands of African American victims of the state terror tactic known as lynching.

Together they offer an alternative, and overwhelmingly coherent, arc of the history of white supremacy from slavery to the arrest of two black men at a Starbucks in Philadelphia this month. They reflect Stevenson’s view that, unlike in South Africa or post-Nazi Germany or many other societies traumatized by history, we’ve hardly begun to grapple with ours — and so cannot yet get beyond it…

The museum and memorial are unlike anything I’ve experienced and more than worth a trip, and I hope (and expect) that millions will come. But I will leave the reviews and descriptions to others. What stood out to me, in this political moment, is the clarity of historical exposition from slavery to Jim Crow to what Stevenson sees as a “new caste system” arising from mass incarceration…

The planning for this museum and memorial began long before a white youth gunned down nine worshipers in an African American church in Charleston, S.C., before we had a president praising neo-Nazis marching in defense of Confederate statues, before an administration began again talking about harsher sentences and more death penalties. Some might find all that discouraging. Stevenson takes a different lesson.

“There was this hope that this race stuff would just evaporate over time — and it doesn’t work like that,” he said. “It is a serious disease, and if we don’t treat it, it doesn’t get better. It doesn’t go away.”

But in the end, there is optimism in his relentless realism. “We’re not doomed by this history. We’re not even defined by it,” he said. “But we do have to face it.”

Reader Interactions

45Comments

  3. 3.

    LanceThruster

    How Uncle Billy dealt with the fake news of the time.

    “We are not only fighting armies, but a hostile people, and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as their organized armies. I know that this recent movement of mine through Georgia has had a wonderful effect in this respect. Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.”

    Letter, William T. Sherman to Henry W. Halleck, December 24, 1864.

  4. 4.

    JGabriel

    Anne Laurie @ Top:

    Late Night Horrorshow Open Thread: The Proper Commemoration of “Confederate Memorial Day”

    I think the proper way to begin commemorating “Confederate Memorial Day” is to call it by its proper name: Southern Treason Day. To be followed up by visiting the blogs and twitter feeds of anyone celebrating Southern Treason Day and reminding them that the liberal north kicked their slave-owning ancestors conservative traitorous asses.

  5. 5.

    JGabriel

    EBT:

    My latest Twitter smut story just got me a $30 tip from someone.

    A gratuity for gratuitous smut?

  6. 6.

    Mike J

    I was reading some moron on twitter today who kept insisting the NRA was being lynched, and when somebody brought up an anti Semitic tweet of hers it was proof that now SHE was being lynched.

    Seems like white and black people suffer very, very different kinds of lynching.

  8. 8.

    hervevillechaizelounge

    @JGabriel:

    I will never understand the mania southerners have for reliving their defeat—yeah, let’s commemorate the time the real Americans kicked our collective ass.

    Hot take: it’s impossible to be both a proud southerner and a patriot. If you think the wrong side won the Civil War you hate America.

  9. 9.

    Mary G

    @EBT: You’ve put a ton of work into it, so you’re probably getting about 10 cents an hour, but it is so validating to have someone actually pay money for something creative you did, or I assume so, because I haven’t experienced it yet.

  10. 10.

    Mike J

    In good news about the slave holder’s rebellion:

    TN House Democrats ? @TNDemocrats
    HJR226, a resolution to put removal of slavery from TN Constitution once and for all on ballot in 2022, just passed on 3rd and final reading in the 110th session. Next stop: resol must be read in 111th session. Congratulations to Rep. Towns on this monumental achievement!

  11. 11.

    Aleta

    People who need to honor the Confederacy should be encouraged to leave the building when almost any US music plays, including Appalachian. Their Elvis records confiscated. They should be refused Coca Cola and most kinds of coffee. Explained to about peanuts. Questioned if they order smoked meat with greens, succotash, jambalaya and LA gumbos, any rice except Asian, black eyed peas with rice or with African plantains, boiled down greens. Cabbage stews. Yams and roasted potatoes. No more couscous for them or sesame seed bagels. Honoring the Confederacy dishonors American forebearers and begetters.

  12. 12.

    Aleta

    “I’ll tell you what does stick with me: the Civil War. Lee and Lincoln and Davis. These are unbelievable historical figures. I think that anything having to do with the Civil War has always been very interesting to me, much more so than even the founding of the country.”
    “I think they could have settled without going to war,” (Trump) said. “I always felt that the South overplayed their hand.

    –from Time I think

    Trump’s high-school education coincided with the resurgence of the civil-rights movement and its push to improve American history classes. The fight has its roots in World War II. Defeating Nazi Germany and its racist ideology inspired a new generation of black activists, Zimmerman said.

    Spurred by the wartime realignment of the American economy, thousands of black families left the South for new opportunities in the North and the West during the Second Great Migration in the 1940s. They quickly encountered stark differences in what their children learned about America’s past. Segregated black schools in the South had often used works by black scholars like Carter Woodson, who became known as the father of black history, and W.E.B. Du Bois to teach history. Northern and Western schools followed a different path. Their textbooks about slavery and the Civil War prompted protests from black families and community leaders.

    African American parents and students emerged as the strongest voices in protesting history curricula. Major black newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News regularly covered new developments in the fight. Civil-rights organizations like the NAACP and the Urban League appointed committees to review textbooks and push back on flawed material. They pressured public officials and textbook publishers to present a more accurate and comprehensive view of black Americans in history.

    “For more than 100 years, the American educational system has revolved around four basic R’s—reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic, and racism,” historian Lerone Bennett Jr. wrote in Ebony magazine in 1967. “By sins of commission and omission, by words said but also by words not said, facts conveniently overlooked and images suppressed, the American school system has made the fourth R—racism—the ground of the traditional three-R fare.”

    New York’s schools were no different. A 1957 report found a textbook on the city’s recommended list which, while roundly condemning its violence, said of the postwar Ku Klux Klan, “Its purposes were patriotic, but its methods cannot be defended.”

    In 1960, four years before Trump graduated high school, Albert Alexander, a textbook analyst for the New York City Board of Education, complained that publishers had warped their coverage of the Civil War so their products could be sold in both the North and the South. He noted that four of the textbooks used in city schools only referred to the conflict as the “War Between the States,” the segregationist South’s preferred term.

    -from Atlantic in 8/2017

  13. 13.

    Mary G

    I reported three people on Twitter who were celebrating their heritage today and they all got suspended.

    In happier news, James Shaw Jr. started a GoFundMe for the families of the victims of the Waffle House shooting to help pay for funerals etc. with a goal of $15,000 and it is over $76,000 so far.

    Yashar Ali of NY Magazine started a GoFundMe towards a college fund for Mr. Shaw’s four-year-old daughter with a goal of $40,000 and it is at $30,000 plus now.

    So there are still good people in America.

    ETA: Shaw is the hero who disarmed the white supremacist.

  16. 16.

    Montanareddog

    @JGabriel:

    reminding them that the liberal north kicked their slave-owning ancestors conservative traitorous asses.

    “Suck it, treasontards!” may be an appropriate riposte.

  17. 17.

    Cermet

    So, alabama has a treason and traitors day – do they also celebrate Ben Laden and old Adolf Hitler, as well? Hero’s one and all for them.

  19. 19.

    AnneWith

    Despite my birthstate’s faults (Arkansas), I’d never heard of this ridiculous holiday before. Anyway, Happy Treason In Defense Of Slavery Day!

    @Cermet: The example I use is Benedict Arnold. If we have statues of Robert E. Lee, why not statues of Benedict Arnold? He was also thought to be a fine general before that minor treason kerfuffle. // I was gratified to learn that the location of Mr. Arnold’s grave is unknown. Suck it, Benedict.

  21. 21.

    BruceFromOhio

    @LanceThruster:

    Thousands who had been deceived by their lying papers into the belief that we were being whipped all the time, realized the truth, and have no appetite for a repetition of the same experience.

    There’s a whole bunch of these fuckers that think flying the rebel flag in front of their houses and on their pick’em up trucks makes them… something. And this in FUCKING OHIO.

    Looks like we’re gonna have to do it again before we can finally get past it.

  22. 22.

    BruceFromOhio

    @Mike J: Just as I cannot fathom how hoarders can live in abject squalor, or how junkies poison themselves to death, I put these folks in the same category: deluded self-destruction that has no apparent cure.

  23. 23.

    Amir Khalid

    @Chet:
    It’s not Lincoln’s party any more. Nixon’s Southern strategy yielded it to them half a century ago.

  24. 24.

    arielibra

    @AnneWith: There is actually a statue in upstate NY of just Arnold’s leg, commemorating his contributions to the side of the good guys before he turned; it doesn’t even use his name.

  25. 25.

    low-tech cyclist

    @Mary G:

    In happier news, James Shaw Jr. started a GoFundMe for the families of the victims of the Waffle House shooting to help pay for funerals etc. with a goal of $15,000 and it is over $76,000 so far.

    Yashar Ali of NY Magazine started a GoFundMe towards a college fund for Mr. Shaw’s four-year-old daughter with a goal of $40,000 and it is at $30,000 plus now.

    Mary, could you provide a proper link to that second GoFundMe page? Here at work, I can get to standard URLs like https://www.gofundme.com/5g07bvs with no problem, but they block access to URLs like https://t.co/BkUyA63VOQ . Thanks!

  26. 26.

    OldDave

    @AnneWith:

    Despite my birthstate’s faults (Arkansas), I’d never heard of this ridiculous holiday before.

    Same birthstate (NE corner), same response. It appears “Confederate Memorial Day” is officially observed in Mississippi and Alabama, with Georgia renaming the day “State Holiday” or some such bullcrap.

  28. 28.

    Ben Cisco

    @BruceFromOhio:

    There’s a whole bunch of these fuckers that think flying the rebel flag in front of their houses and on their pick’em up trucks makes them… something. And this in FUCKING OHIO.

    Looks like we’re gonna have to do it again before we can finally get past it.

    I am slowly, sadly, coming to the same conclusion.

  29. 29.

    low-tech cyclist

    @BruceFromOhio:

    There’s a whole bunch of these fuckers that think flying the rebel flag in front of their houses and on their pick’em up trucks makes them… something. And this in FUCKING OHIO.

    Here in southern Maryland, one of the few silver linings of the 9/11 attacks back in 2001 was that almost all those Confederate flag flyers around here switched to flying the U.S. flag. I see an occasional Confederate flag these days – more than I saw in 2002, but way, way fewer than I saw in 2000. Maybe a week or two in between times that I’ll see a small Confederate flag decal on the back window of someone’s pickup truck, and months between seeing actual flags.

  32. 32.

    The Pale Scot

    Biggest mistake the country ever did. The traitors should have been subjected to same treatment ANY other country of the times would have given, disarm the population, execute the officers and NCOs, and subject them heavy taxation to repay the coast of the war

  35. 35.

    Chris

    @Ben Cisco:

    My conclusion is even bleaker: even in the hypothetical case of a Civil War breaking out and us winning it, I suspect the aftermath would be pretty much like it was in the 1860s/70s. Lots of preaching about how the blue-state whites and the red-state whites need to make up and be friends again, with the nonwhites thrown under the carpet as the price of that policy.

  36. 36.

    H.E.Wolf

    @The Pale Scot:

    Biggest mistake the country ever did. The traitors should have been subjected to same treatment ANY other country of the times would have given, disarm the population, execute the officers and NCOs, and subject them heavy taxation to repay the coast of the war

    Many in 1865, and later, agreed with you. The newly re-elected President thought otherwise.

    With malice toward none; with charity for all; with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in; to bind up the nation’s wounds; to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just, and a lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations.

    He was assassinated exactly six weeks later, so it will never be known what would have happened if he had served a full second term.

  37. 37.

    SFAW

    @EBT:

    My latest Twitter smut story just got me a $30 tip from someone.

    So you’re saying you’re no longer deprived, on account of you’re depraved?

  38. 38.

    The Moar You Know

    My grandfather used to work for the state of Alabama, and I’ve been to the capital building more often than I’d like. There’s a gigantic bronze star laid into the stairs that proclaims “on this spot Jefferson Davis declared the Confederate States of America”. Very sure it’s still there.

    Don’t pay it much mind, it’s one of those shithole countries the president warned us all about a while back.

  39. 39.

    Chris

    @H.E.Wolf:

    I don’t know that Lincoln would’ve been as harsh as warranted (I’m pretty sure not, actually). On the other hand, he wouldn’t have been actively sabotaging Reconstruction, like his VP did, so it couldn’t possibly have gone worse.

  41. 41.

    J R in WV

    I have never understood people flying the flag of treason in defense of slavery. Treason is treason, as unpatriotic as it gets.

  42. 42.

    EBT

    @Mary G: The smuts take me about 2-3 hours to write actually. Sex kinda just comes naturally. The big interactive fiction on the other hand yeah, I’ve poured thousands of hours of work in to that so far.

  43. 43.

    Kenneth Kohl

    There’s a whole bunch of these fuckers that think flying the rebel flag in front of their houses and on their pick’em up trucks makes them… something. And this in FUCKING OHIO.

    Sounds like Gen. Billy Sherman may need to clean up some of his fellow Ohioans…

    I’m a native Buckeye living in WNY; there are a smattering of confederate flags adorning pick-up trucks (obviously) in the more small town’ish areas.

  44. 44.

    Stan

    @hervevillechaizelounge: it’s impossible to be both a proud southerner and a patriot.

    It’s impossible to be a proud white fan of the confederacy and be a patriot.

    It is perfectly possible to be a proud southerner and a patriot though. The south is more than the four years of the confederacy; half the people in the “south” never supported the confederacy. This included all the black people who were there in 1861 (four million) plus a majority of the folks in the border states that were culturally ‘southern’ but never confederate. Kentucky, Maryland and West Virginia, for example, were never part of the slave power’s confederacy but they are and were clearly southern culturally. Finally, don’t forget that from 1776 to 1865, slavery was legal under the US flag. We all own that racism.
    Sorry but it bugs me when people say “the south” when they mean “the confederacy”.

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