“Was Robert E. Lee’s daughter, in some perverse way, a forerunner of Rosa Parks?”
I don’t understand why it was “perverse.”
I caught that, too. The writer just couldn’t do the piece without somehow making SOME derogatory remark.
I took a minute to read a little about Mrs. Mary Anna Randolph Custis Lee and found these two nice little nuggets.
“Again following the example of her mother, Mary Lee taught Arlington slave women to sew, read and write. Advocating the idea of eventual emancipation, Mary wanted to ensure that all of the enslaved people, would be able to support themselves when they were freed.”
snip
“After the Civil War, Mary accompanied Robert to Lexington, Virginia where he became the president of Washington College, later named Washington & Lee University. Arlington was very important to her and she never quite got over its loss. “Life is waning away, and with the exception of my own immediate family, I am cut off from all I have ever known & loved in my youth & my dear old Arlington I cannot bear to think of that used as it is now & so little hope of my ever getting there again. I do not think I can die in peace until I have seen it once more.”
“Mary Lee did visit Arlington a few months before her death in 1873. Unable to get out of the carriage, one of her former slaves, brought her a drink of water from the well. “I rode out to my dear old home but so changed it seemed but a dream of the past—I could not have realised (sic) it was Arlington but for the few old oaks they had spared & the trees planted by the Genl and myself which are raising their tall branches to the Heaven which seems to smile on the desecration around them.”
From http://www.nps.gov/archive/arho/tour/history/bios/marclee.html
It is perverse if you think like a socialist. R.E. Lee's daughter was a racist, froth-at-the-mouth bigot, because her father was one of the top two or three racists in human history. Marse Robert was a bigot since he refused to allow the Federal Government to illegally trash the economy and laws of his state for some vague "high moral purpose."
Lee was a slave owner, and, like all slavers, raped and tortured his property on a regular basis. Did you know that, despite being a hereditary heir of the country's founding royalty, Lee was a traitor to his elite class?
/sarcasm off
“I don’t understand why it was “perverse.””
Because the war that her father led was infinitely more about keeping slaves than states rights.
I don’t understand why it was “perverse.”
Perhaps because she treated negro slaves back then better than black American leaders treat black Americans today ;-(
“Was Robert E. Lee’s daughter, in some perverse way, a forerunner of Rosa Parks?”
I don’t understand why it was “perverse.”
Its not. The ‘perversity’ is found in the WaPo’s description of it.