Bridge controversy resurfaces NAACP to file complaint for 'Confederate' name change

Leaf-Chronicle ^ | Monday, September 10, 2001 | JILL NOELLE CECIL

[Kaslin]

The Clarksville branch of the NAACP plans to file a complaint with the United States Commission on Civil Rights because of the City Council's decision last month to name a new bridge after Confederate soldiers.

Its president, Robert Hatcher, read a resolution to the council Thursday night vowing the "branch will work vigorously to prevent and/or undo the naming of any public property after the Confederacy or any variation thereof."

[Kaslin]

This is really getting ridiculous.

[GaConfed]

We don't care what you think. It's people like you that draws my mind more toward secession everyday.

[B Knotts]

All I'm saying is that it sounds like the act of a bunch of white trash politicians who have no sense and no concept of the feelings of others.

I'm no big Confederacy lover, but couldn't the same be said of the other side in this controversy?

[No Truce With Kings]

I have an idea -- call it "Black Confederate Veterans Bridge." Then inscribe the names of Black Confederate veterans on the approaches to the bridge.

Thousands of blacks served in the Confederate armed forces, many in combat roles in 1865. Cannot think of a monument for them. And the beauty of it is that this would irritate racists of all races, white and black alike.

[NovemberCharlie]

If it was an old monument getting renamed, I'd be marching with you - but since it isn't, there is no call for it.

If it was an old monument getting renamed, I'd be ticked at the slight to its former namesakes.

[Nellie Wilkerson]

These soldiers have no headstones. Evidently they were there before the bridge was. The city or state or whoever built this bridge and road on or near those graves. I think it's appropriate to name it the Confederate Soldier's Bridge.

For the past year or two, I've heard the phrase, "a slap in the fact for blacks," from one end of the country to the other, but especially in the South, and it's starting to sound like an NAACP script. Thanks to what passes for education kids are getting in America's schools, I suspect there's a whole generation of blacks (and whites) who don't really even know what the Confederacy was.

Slap in the face, indeed. This is simply the NAACP struggling to remain relevant.

[NovemberCharlie]

You don't deliberately go about naming confederate monuments for people you're not related to and don't remember personally, all to make a point.

I've never met any participants in the Texas Revolution, nor, to the best of my knowledge, am I related to any of them. Would it therefore be improper for me to propose naming a stretch of highway or something similar in their honor?

[NovemberCharlie]

What was the name of that military academy in Mexico City?

[NovemberCharlie]

Don't know, but the name of the battle I had in mind was Chapultepec. A palatial fortress in Mexico City, it was the site of one of the final battles of the Mexican War. Among its defenders was the class of a military college adjoining the place, who died there to the last man. If I recall correctly, one of them jumped off a cliff wrapped in the Mexican flag. A rather powerful image.

Anyway, my point to all this was to show another lost cause that people still remember fondly.

[No Truce With Kings]

In fact, I'm hard pressed to come up with a historic example of any nation besides this one which had countless monuments to the loser of a war, much less a group of people who lost a revolution.

What about Scotland? Ireland? Admittedly, Ireland had few monuments to its losses to Britain until after the Irish Free State was organized, but Scotland had many. And the South was settled by the Scots-Irish. (Maybe this whole "lost cause" romanticism is just a Scots-Irish thing. Repeat after me: "Charlie is me darlin', me darlin', me darlin'. . .)

[shuckmaster]

Aw, Shucks!