Posted on 12/26/2003 9:21:31 PM PST by El Conservador
HAMPTON, Va. - At Jefferson Davis Middle School, a civil war of words is being waged over a petition drive to erase the name of the slave-owning Confederate president from the school.
Opinion is mixed, and it's not necessarily along racial lines.
"If it had been up to Robert E. Lee, these kids wouldn't be going to school as they are today," said civil rights leader Julian Bond, now a history professor at the University of Virginia. "They can't help but wonder about honoring a man who wanted to keep them in servitude."
That argument isn't accepted universally among Southern black educators, including the school superintendent in Petersburg, where about 80 percent of the 36,000 residents are black. Three schools carry the names of Confederates.
"It's not the name on the outside of the building that negatively affects the attitudes of the students inside," Superintendent Lloyd Hamlin said. "If the attitudes outside of the building are acceptable, then the name is immaterial."
It is difficult to say how many public schools in the 11 former Confederate states are named for Civil War leaders from the South. Among the more notable names, the National Center for Education Statistics lists 19 Robert E. Lees, nine Stonewall Jacksons and five Davises. J.E.B. Stuart, Turner Ashby, George Edward Pickett each have at least one school bearing their name.
For some, these men who defended a system that allowed slavery should not be memorialized on public schools where thousands of black children are educated.
The symbols and the names of the Confederacy remain powerful reminders of the South's history of slavery and the war to end it. States, communities and institutions continue to debate what is a proper display of that heritage.
Students in South Carolina have been punished for wearing Confederate flag T-shirts to school. The town of Clarksdale, Miss., permanently lowered the state flag — which has a Confederate emblem in one corner — to recognize "the pain and suffering it has symbolized for many years." And the Richmond-area Boy Scouts dropped Lee's name from its council this year.
In the most sweeping change, the Orleans Parish School Board in Louisiana gave new names to schools once named for historical figures who owned slaves. George Washington Elementary School was renamed for Dr. Charles Richard Drew, a black surgeon who organized blood banks during World War II.
In Gadsden, Ala., however, officials have resisted efforts to rename a middle school named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, an early backer of the Ku Klux Klan. And a school board in Kentucky adopted a new dress code that eliminates bans on provocative symbols including the Confederate flag.
The naming of schools after Confederate figures is particularly rich with symbolism because of the South's slow move to integrate. Many schools were named after the U.S. Supreme Court (news - web sites) ruled segregated schools unconstitutional in 1954 but before the departure of whites left many inner city schools majority black.
"Now whites are complaining that they are changing the name of Stonewall Jackson High School," says Fitzhugh Brundage, a University of North Carolina history professor who is writing a book on "black and white memory from the Civil War."
While far from always the case, the naming of some public schools after Confederate generals was a parting shot to blacks emerging from segregated schools.
"It was an attempt to blend the past with the present but holding onto a romanticized past," Jennings Wagoner, a U.Va. scholar on the history of education, said of the practice of naming schools after Lee, Jackson and others. "It was also a time of extreme racism."
Erenestine Harrison, who launched the petition drive to rename Jefferson Davis Middle School, attended Hampton's segregated public schools. She moved north in 1967 and was struck by the school names upon her return seven years ago to Hampton, a city at the mouth of Chesapeake Bay. Educated as a psychologist, she has worked in the city schools as a substitute teacher.
"If I were a kid, especially a teenager, I would be ashamed to tell a friend that I went to Jefferson Davis," said Harrison, 55. "Basically, those guys fought for slavery."
But Henry Kidd, former Virginia commander of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (news - web sites), sees efforts by Harrison and others as a "chipping away, piece by piece, at our history."
But who was the stereotypical slaveholder? A wealthy, white, southern landholder. The portrait that it was a "white Southerner fighting to keep slaves picking cotton" is not altogether correct. Most of the soldiers in the Southern cause were not slaveholders at all. Most of the primary members of the CSA government and the movers behind secession, on the other hand, were proponents of slavery. You can read it in their speeches. You can see it in their "constitution." It is amply recorded in their letters.
I agree with you that American history is being destroyed by the socialists, liberals , and the PC crowd. I have been careful to differentiate between the real military leaders in the CSA, and the politcal leaders. They were a different crowd and had different motivations. Only a few, such as John Breckenridge, spanned the gap between the military and the political realms. In my mind, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jackson, and others, were military men of principle, even if their motivation is seen, in retrospect, as wrong. On the other hand, the political leaders, such as Davis, Rhett, Toombs, Stephens, etc, were very much traitors.
One last point. The land which is now occupied by Arlington cemetary was the inheritance of Mrs. Lee. Robert E. Lee never owned it, as I recall.
The European Union can never be viewed as a "nation" because of the vast differences in language, culture, etc. between the client states. It is ostensibly an "economic union." American nationalism based on common language, common heritage, common values, and common experiences pre-dated the Revolutionary War.
In my example, you will never find anywhere where I have said that the European Union is analogous to the pre-Civil War United States. My example was a hypothetical set 20 years into the future.
For one thing, the European Union Constitution has yet to be signed. As you know, that latest fly in the E.U. Constitutional ointment is the issue of voting weight between large and small States. Spain and Poland are now fighting to keep more voting weight for small States and France and Germany are fighting to have less voting weight for the small States. An identical issue arose and was dealt with at the U.S. Constitution Convention.
American Colonial heritage may have been formed in common experiences during the Revolutionary War but, likewise, European Union heritage has been formed in the shared tragedy of the suffering of World War II and the Cold War.
In regards to "shared experiences prior to the American Revolutionary War", that was made up, to a great extent of escaping the religious persecutions of earlier generations with Puritan New England and the Cavalier South coming from opposite ends of that spectrum.
In regards to shared "culture", New England culture was based on a Puritanical, maritime and then industrial free-labor society while the Southern culture was based on a Cavalier, agrarian, slave-labor society. That is a vast cultural gulf that will not be found today between, say, Spain and Germany.
Although it is true that the European Union is, at the current momement, more of an economic union than a political union, it is their stated goal to form a political union. That goal took a Spanish and a Polish torpedo to the port side earlier this month but both France and Germany are determined to keep trying to achieve a political European Union nation-state with, of course, Germany and France as the dominant entities.
As time passes, it is very plausible to see the European Union fall apart before they ever sign a Consitution but it is also very plausible to see the birth of a political European Union, complete with a Constitution ratified and signed by all members.
If such a European Union Constitution comes to pass, it may very well address all potentially catastrophic issues.
If such a European Union Constitution comes to pass, howver, it may also very well repeat the grave error of the U.S. Consitutional Convention where elephants such as the incompatibility of a slave-based culture and a free-labor based culture and the entire issue of the legality of seccession were swept under the rug so that future American generations, say, in the 1850's, 1860's or 1870's could peacefully resolve those issues that nobody wanted to hash out, once and for all, in 1787.
The hospital in Los Angeles originally named in his honor is now The Martin Luther King Jr. Drew Medical Center; hard to find a black patient there or someone who speaks English, but boy, do they have lots of pregnant women recently arrived - hallways full.
Oh my Lord, that is the best suggestion I've ever read. Brilliant, succinct and funny as hell. LOL.
Sort of redundant qualifications, for the most part. To vote one had to be free, white 21, male, and a property owner. Neither slaves nor their upkeep were cheap. Land, for the most part, well employed, was a prime source of wealth. In lieu of mechanized farming (yet to come), a large labor force was needed to work the land.
Then, as today, the more sucessful farming operations ended up absorbing the inefficient or poorly run ones.
It stands to reason that slave-owners, overall, had those characteristics. Southern, because of the growing season/climate.
Even today despite the socialist/divisionist rhetoric about the "rich white man" you see few Bugattis in trailer parks.
Please note that rampant abuse of slaves would not get the work done, nor done well. Even wartime slave-labor (when being shot was a distinct possibility) managed to be inefficient, wasteful, and on occasion to perpetrate sabotage. Healthy, happy, positively motivated labor forces still work better than abused ones working out of fear. Any disciplinary measures undertaken against individuals had to be clearly appropriate and justified.
The real pity is that even though common sense indicates that abuse was not widespread, a NOVEL, with all the era's taste for hyperbole, is studied as history and accepted as the normal paridigm. That this NOVEL has been used for over 100 years to foment hate and derision against an entire region, hate and derision which continue to this day, simply amazes me.
Next, someone will be using Spartacus to justify treating the Italians shabbily...
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