Posted on 07/05/2005 2:28:57 PM PDT by Irontank
Today H.K. Edgerton, a black man from Asheville, N.C., will walk into Maryville with a Confederate flag and a hope for ``dialogue.''
He'll stop at the Blount County Courthouse, at about 1 p.m., to get his message out, one that he hopes will bring blacks and whites together, rather than divide people.
He walked this week from Johnson City and has experienced both affection and anger from people he's met on the road.
``This is not about a longevity trip, not like it was when I walked to Texas. This is more about coming to Maryville to try to change ... a social injustice,'' Edgerton said Thursday. ``The city of Maryville epitomizes the cultural genocide that is taking place in the South, and continuation of trying to divide and separate blacks folks from white folks around here.''
Banning the flag is a part of reconstructionist, revisionist view of history taking place in the South, he said, and along with that comes the loss of a piece of the region's story.
``There's a story that's not being told here in the south end of America -- a tragedy here in Maryville.''
At the courthouse, he said he hopes members of the Maryville Board of Education will come out and talk with him. He was critical of the board's decision to ban the flags.
Last month, the board voted on first reading to ban flags, noisemakers, sirens, whistles, laser-pointers and hand-held signs. The no-flag policy would eliminate the use of a symbol long associated with the school.
``Now here we have an institution -- calls itself a school board -- it's supposed to be for a process of learning for our children,'' said Edgerton. ``Instead of teaching those children the other side of the story, because there's more than one side of the story -- we each come here with the same Northern revisionist history and we start to ban the flag, stop the dialogue -- don't want to have it. ... You can't turn black folks into haters against their sovereign; create all the same kind of reconstructionist hatred that Abraham Lincoln and his boys did around here.
``We've totally opened our arms to folks that come here; now they want to change our morals, who we are as people, dishonor our ancestors, and then all we're going to do is just holler `slavery' and end the dialogue and, no sir: it don't happen like that, don't work like that.
``There are many Southerners around here just like myself, who are loyal to the South, who know and understand history, and who know and understand this reconstructionist, revisionist policy folks abuse.''
Edgerton said the point of the walk was to call attention to the ``ethnic cleansing of Southern history.''
His march is sponsored by the Tennessee Division of the Sons of the Confederate Veterans. He is a former president of the Asheville Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also serves as chairman for the Board of Advisors of the Southern Legal Resource Center, a ``Southern heritage'' civil rights organization in Black Mountain, N.C.
He brushed aside the titles, though, and said he was just ``an old Southern black boy. I've been in civil rights all my life. .... I'm just an ordinary country boy from the South who loves the southland.''
A noble cause
"Banning the flag is a part of reconstructionist, revisionist view of history taking place in the South, he said, and along with that comes the loss of a piece of the region's story."
Damn straight.
Odd that they didn't mention his NAACP membership has been suspended. That's one thing that really got me on his side...that, and the march he made. Saw him on the news last week - pretty neat guy.
The liberal school boards can't have Southern blacks thinking for themselves. I'll be interested to see how his journey turns out. Best wishes for his success.
The genocide part was in reference to the Nazi Germany. The Soviet Gulags while typically similar to the concentration camps under Communism, were not practicing genocide. Or at least so I have read.
The blame for reconstruction is not on Lincoln, the war was his fault. Andrew Johnson tried to follow Lincoln's Reconstruction program and the Yanks were short one vote of impeaching him.
The fault for the failure of Reconstruction lies with the likes of Thaddeus Stevens, U.S Grant, etc etc.
If the Yankees had let Johnson do his job, this country would have been spared heartbreak.
ping
bttt
Gotcha. Good point.
Uh, the likes of Stevens were trying to impose radical ideas in 1864, and in maybe the only good thing he did as President, Lincoln opposed them
When Kennedy was killed I was 1, so I don't think I had any recognition of what was occuring at the time.
" Hard to blame "
Uh, yes, it's hard to blame policies which created the backlash that instituted Jim Crow..... right.....
I think what this guy is referring to is the deliberate erasure of a culture - in this case, the particular culture of the Southern USA. The real object of the left's agenda, which they only rarely state openly, is to abolish Christianity in any form. Getting rid of the culture that arose in the south, with its string Christian element, is a step towards the ultimate goal, which actually will involve gulags and mass executions.
The definition of geocide as used at the Nuremburg trials includes the deliberate erasure of a culture, BTW. His use of the term is not entirely inaccurate, just unusual.
"Without Boothe, Lincoln would not have been as harsh on the South"
Lincoln couldn't be harsh on the South because he was dead because of Booth.
In fact, Lincoln was not going to be harsh at all, as evidenced by the fact that Johnson was trying to follow Lincoln's plan which was not harsh.
"I do know that freeing uneducated slaves and turning them out with no safety net did a lot to create the Jim Crow South. Most had no place to go and ended up back on the plantation in arguably worse circumstances than they were in in 1860. Would that have happened under Lincoln? I don't know but It happened and all the shoulda, coulda, wouldas in the world ain't gonna change it now."
Freeing the slaves didn't create the Jim Crow South, that's a Northern liberal myth that is used to try and absolve Grant and Co. from their historical guilt.
The real reason Jim Crow occured is because the liberal Reconstruction governments were so corrupt that they'd make H.P Long blush. Most Reconstruction officials successfully bankrupted governments, state and local. And these governments were held in power because African-Americans voted in blocs in those days.
So essentially, the common theme of the Bourbon was to blame blacks for all the wrongs done by the Yankee authorities, because without their votes, there would have been no elected Yankee authorities. The Bourbon sold Redeemer government to poor Southern whites on a platform of racial solidarity and carpetbagger bashing.
As soon as the Bourbons took power, the dynamic began to change, the rise of Populism swept the land, threating to unite black and white in opposition to the planter/business elites (and quite honestly, my ancestors). Southern poor whites began pushing a neo-Socialist program which included in some cases, wealth redistribution, and one thing they wanted above all else, higher wages.
At this point, African-Americans looked more attractive to Bourbons, they didn't demand high wages, they had no interest in grassroots political action or free silver. All they wanted was to make money to feed their family and to be left alone. Therefore, as poor Whites became agitators, poor Blacks became great employment prospects. African-Americans were also openly courted in those days, and in several states, tenous alliances formed between blacks and the Bourbons.
Now your populists were enraged by this, and it was at this point, around 1887, that populism in the South began to take on a racial tone. It was the movement of the poor Southern white striking out against their new oppresors, basically the Bourbon leadership and their black employees.
In the 1890s, charismatic racist Populist politicians took control of state parties, and as such began pushing the program that became Jim Crow. Jim Crow was a Socialist movement, a movement that would not have occured had the Yankees not ravaged the Southland.
Their new procievced oppressors.
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