Posted on 10/11/2007 2:41:12 PM PDT by Lorianne
Nelson Winbush is intent on defending the flag of his grandfather. It's just surprising which flag that is. ___
KISSIMMEE -- Nelson Winbush rotates a miniature flag holder he keeps on his mantel, imagining how the banners would appear in a Civil War battle.
The Stars and Bars, he explains, looked too much like the Union flag to prevent friendly fire. The Confederacy responded by fashioning the distinctive Southern Cross -- better known as the rebel flag.
Winbush, 78, is a retired assistant principal with a master's degree, a thoughtful man whose world view developed from listening to his grandfather's stories about serving the South in the "War Between the States."
His grandfather's casket was draped with a Confederate flag. His mother pounded out her Confederate heritage on a typewriter. He wears a rebel flag pinned to the collar of his polo shirt.
Winbush is also black.
"You've never seen nothing like me, have you?"
* * *
Winbush's nondescript white brick house near Kissimmee's quaint downtown is cluttered with the mess of a life spent hoarding history.
Under the glass of his coffee table lie family photos, all of smiling black people. On top sits Ebony magazine.
Winbush is retired and a widower who keeps a strict schedule of household chores, family visits and Confederate events. He often eats at Fat Boy's Barbecue, where his Sons of Confederate Veterans camp meets.
Winbush's words could come from the mouth of any white son of a Confederate veteran. They subscribe to a sort of religion about the war, a different version than mainstream America.
The tenets, repeated endlessly by loyalists:
The war was not about slavery. The South had the constitutional right to secede. Confederate soldiers were battling for their homes and their families. President Lincoln was a despot. Most importantly, the victors write the history.
But Winbush has a conceptual canyon to bridge: How can a black man defend a movement that sought to keep his people enslaved?
* * *
Winbush is one of at most a handful of black members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans in the country. He knows skeptics question his story and his sanity.
To win them over, he pulls out his grandfather's pension papers, reunion photos and obituary. He also gives speeches, mostly before white audiences.
Winbush believes the South seceded because the federal government taxed it disproportionately. It was a matter of states' rights, not slavery, which was going extinct as the United States became more industrialized, he says. He denies that President Lincoln freed the slaves, explaining that the Emancipation Proclamation affected only the Confederate states, which were no longer under his authority.
"It was an exercise in rhetoric, that's all," Winbush says.
His views run counter to many historical accounts. Rev. Nelson B. Rivers III, the field operations chief for the NAACP, called Winbush's arguments illogical. Rivers spoke with Winbush by telephone a few years ago, intrigued by his position. Rivers remembers him being loud and sincere, holding fast to his convictions.
"I was courteous and respectful and respectfully disagreed with him," Rivers said. "This is America. He has a right to believe what he wants to."
At one speech, Winbush stood in front of the square battle flag that draped his grandfather's coffin, retelling the stories he has told so many times that the words emerge in identical iterations.
At the end of his talk, he held the microphone to a stereo and played a song by the Rebelaires, with a sorrowful, bluesy rhythm: "You may not believe me, but things was just that way. Black is nothing other than a darker shade of rebel gray."
Once other Confederates recognize that his story is real, they love him. Opponents often attack white Confederates as ignorant or racist. Winbush is harder to dismiss. If nothing else, the naysayers are more willing to listen.
"It kinda wipes out the whole segregation and hate and racism issue," said Christopher Hall, 29, commander of Winbush's SCV camp. "Coming from him, that really can't be an argument."
* * *
Winbush's views were once more widespread, even in the land of theme parks and turnpikes.
Florida was the third state to secede. Its Civil War governor, John Milton, shot himself rather than rejoin the North, telling the Legislature, "Death would be preferable to reunion." Former Gov. Lawton Chiles defended the Confederate flag in 1996 when black lawmakers asked for its removal from the Capitol.
"You can't erase history," Chiles said at the time.
But now neo-Confederates are losing this second war of culture and memory.
Confederate flags are coming down, especially from the tops of Southern statehouses, including Florida's in 2001.
The agrarian Bible Belt has become the Sun Belt, full of northerners with few deep roots in the area. Identification with the South as a region has declined since the World War II era, which united the country with patriotism and the interstate system. Areas of South Florida, for instance, are known better as the sixth borough of New York than part of the Deep South.
High school teachers don't preach the righteousness of the South. And historians, for the most part, agree that the Civil War was about slavery, undermining the standard neo-Confederate argument.
But Confederate loyalists are digging in. Winbush considers the South his homeland. And his family history, because it's rarer than that of white Confederates, is in danger of extinction.
* * *
Slowly, in his deep, rough voice, Winbush tells the story of a young slave from a Tennessee plantation named Louis Napoleon Nelson, who went to war as a teenager with the sons of his master.
"They grew up together," Winbush says.
At first his grandfather cooked and looked out for the others, but later he saw action, fighting with a rifle under the command of Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a slave trader and plantation owner.
At Shiloh, a two-day battle in 1862 in which more than 23,000 American men were killed or wounded, the Confederate Army needed a chaplain. Louis Nelson couldn't read or write, but he had memorized the King James Bible.
He stayed on as chaplain for the next four campaigns, leading services for both Confederate and Union soldiers, before they headed back to the battlefield.
He also foraged for food. One time, he killed a mule, cut out a quarter and hauled it back to his comrades.
"When you don't have anything else, mule meat tastes pretty good," he would tell his grandson.
Some topics even the loquacious grandfather considered off limits. He wouldn't talk about the Union siege of Vicksburg, a bloody battle that captured an important Mississippi River port and effectively split the South.
After the war, he lived as a free man on the James Oldham plantation for 12 more years. Then he became a plasterer, traveling the South to work on houses.
Over the years, he went to 39 Confederate reunions, wearing a woolly gray uniform that Winbush still has.In photos, he stands next to two white men who accompanied him to soldiers' reunions until they were old men. Through the sepia gleams a dignity earned on the battlefield.
"When he came back, that was storytelling time," Winbush says.
His grandfather died in 1934 at the age of 88. The local paper ran an obituary that called him a "darky." Winbush is proud that his grandfather's death was marked at all.
* * *
Winbush grew up in the house his grandfather built in 1908, a two-story yellow structure with a wraparound porch in Ripley, Tenn. The Oldham plantation, where his grandfather was a slave, provided the wood in recognition of his loyalty to the family.
Winbush and his siblings lived in a family of educators. His grandmother and mother were teachers. He says he first went to school as a baby in a basket.
All three children went to college. Winbush studied biology in hopes of becoming a doctor but didn't have enough money for medical school. He switched to studying physical education.
Winbush moved to Florida in 1955, a year after the U.S. Supreme Court's Brown vs. Board of Education decision mandated school desegregation. Like many around the country, Osceola County schools remained segregated for several more years.
He didn't mind the divide because he felt both black and white students got a better education by not being able to use racial conflict as an excuse. When the superintendent, a friend of his, decided it was time to integrate in the late 1960s, Winbush agreed. The time had come, he thought, when people could accept the change.
Winbush thinks that people will get along if they know each other. He says he never suffered any blatant racism. The small Southern towns he lived in were familiar and accepting.
He remembers the "I Have A Dream" speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. He respects King but disagrees with his reverence for Lincoln.
Winbush wasn't moved by the speech. King was just speaking the truth, he says, but it didn't change the daily reality of blacks.
* * *
Winbush's convictions about the war lay dormant until 1991, when the NAACP began an all-out campaign against the Confederate flag, saying it was a symbol of hatred. It vowed to have it removed from public places by the end of the decade.
Winbush saw it differently, and he was retiring. He no longer worried about what some "Yankee boss" would think.
"I got fed up about all this politically correct mess," he says.
He joined the Sons and started speaking at their events. He twice appeared before the Virginia Legislature to dissuade them from taking down the flag. He collects clippings of newspaper stories written about his speeches. One shows him posing in front of a statute of Nathan Bedford Forrest.
Winbush acknowledges that misuse of the Confederate flag has made it a symbol of hate in some people's eyes. But he says the American flag is just as racist. Troops of color are sent to die disproportionately in American wars, he says, and the Stars and Stripes flew above slave ships.
Rivers, the NAACP official, said people like Winbush need to let go of their family history and admit that all people, even those now dead, are imperfect.
"Just because your grandfather was wrong does not mean you can't break the generational curse and not be wrong too," he says.
* * *
Winbush is the last direct link to his grandfather, someone who heard the stories firsthand and felt the passion.
He feels the legacy of Confederate soldiers like his grandfather won't survive unless the history is passed within families, from one generation to the next.
But it's not easy. Even Winbush's son, a Naval Academy graduate who works for IBM, once suggested Winbush donate his Confederate collection to a museum.
"This is the only way some people will find out what did happen," he said. "The history books leave it out."
Winbush knows he won't be around forever. He only hopes that someone will continue to tell the stories.
Times researchers Carolyn Edds and John Martin contributed to this report. Stephanie Garry can be reached at sgarry@sptimes.com.
You can do better than that..If the Southerners would’nt have done this , the Yankees would’nt have done that..come on..
Without consumers there would be no suppliers. Simple economics.
You’re right,,and the banks really backed off.I can just hear them,,We will never finance this market for human flesh,we just will not do it ..but ,,,we could make,,,$$$
You’re right,,and the banks really backed off.I can just hear them,,We will never finance this market for human flesh,we just will not do it ..but ,,,we could make,,,$$$
No they didn't back off. They no doubt made a lot of money. But they weren't the only guilty party in this. They didn't haul the slaves in and force Southerners to buy them at gunpoint.
Sorry about the double post , this machine is acting strange tonight...
Particularly in the Midwest. There was a great deal of xenophobia towards blacks there. They were very much afraid southerners would try to offload their black population.
They were enacted during the period when the northern states were trying to eliminate their own black populations through structures manumission laws.
How would those affect Southern states? Virginia passed a law, later incorportated into their state constitution, that said a slave freed in Virginia had 12 months in which to leave the commonwealth or else be sold back into slavery. Now how could anything that a Northern state did require a law like that on Virginia's books?
It affected the southern states because that's where slaves from the north who were sold instead of freed wound up. They didn't arrive as free men, but were taken there as slaves - so the law you are referencing wouldn't matter.
And we had this conversation before and I showed you a citation showing that this law was not enforced.
And the free black numbers in the census are known to be bogus. Free black men listed their wives and children as slaves for legal reasons.
You're making this stuff up as you go along, aren't you?
When you run out of arguments the gracious thing to do is concede - not switch to insults.
In some places it was not legal to free a slave and almost everywhere there were costs to do so. For a good look at the difficulties in teasing out the meaning of those census figures you worship so much may I suggest Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860.
It was a business,,,the North bought the Slaves,,the South bought the Slaves from the North,,,not to hard to understand..The South,,,AND,,,the North needed workers,(sounds present day),,The North had to fight for ??...That’s the question..
No one ever said the South was forced to buy Slaaves..
This lecture(mp3) by professor Donald Livingston might blow your mind then. Southern Secession and Reconstruction. It's about an hour.
Sure. Look at the census figures for 1850 and 1860. The growth in the number of free blacks in most southern states was flat if it did not, in fact, decline. If the laws you are speaking about were rigidly enforced in in Midwestern states as you claim, and states like Illinois and Ohio and Michigan saw increases in the black population of 40 or 50 or 110 percent, then how can you claim that such laws were not enforced in Southern states where the free black population in most states hardly grew at all?
Free blacks were hardly welcomed in Northern states, that is irrefutable. They were disliked, discriminated against, and were denied rights in many states. But it is also irrefutable that blacks were welcomed in Southern states only if they were property. That the were distrusted, disliked, and discriminated against more in Southern states than in Northern ones. That the kinds of laws you complain about in some Northern states also existed in all Southern ones and that they were enforced. And that as bad as things were for free blacks up North, they were significantly worse for free blacks in the South.
I applaud Nelson Winbush and his stance against ignorance (on both sides of the color divide). The CBF was not a symbol of racism until it was adopted by several predominantly Northern racist organizations in the very early 60s. True students of history will understand and note that there have always been more seeds of racism North of the Mason-Dixon line than there ever were South of it.
Another interesting thing is that the vast majority of true racists will not recognize the Stars and Bars as the Confederate Ensign.
I believe that the south was very much for big government. The variety they favored may might have been less big centralized government, but in practice they've been strongly for big decentralized government. There's no bigger government than one with the aim of suppressing one group of people for the benefit of another. Some of the worst abuses of freedom in our nation have been in the name of "States' Rights". There's a lot of things I admire about the South, but its Democratic Party heavy handed government is not one of them.
Had the South won their independence the North would be what it is now I expect. I’d like to believe though that the Southland would have been less intrusive, clung to States rights and less taxed.
In one way government in the North would be less taxed because there would not be the net flow of government funds from the rest of the country to the South. But the South would have to pay it's own way so taxes might have to be raised in Dixie.
I live down here and even now, even with the the intrusion of the Federal Government, we are less taxed and live with less regulation.
Maybe the south should raise their taxes some so the rest of the country can get a break. The greatest States Right for northern states is to see the end of the flow of federal funds to the old Confederate states.
I don’t doubt that slavery was a bad thing, but if conditions in the South were so horrendous for blacks compared to the North, why was there never a mass exodus? To this day Mississippi is still the blackest state in the country. Once freed, almost all blacks stayed right where they were. The ones who moved North probably did so for economic reasons, the same as poor whites moving North or West during periods of economic depravation. The South, after all, was economically destroyed by the war, and conditions for poor folks weren’t exactly the best for quite a long time.
Hogwash. I will be the last person to say that things for blacks above the Mason-Dixon line were all pie and ice cream by any stretch of the imagination. But looking back at the laws and restrictions placed on free blacks prior to the rebellion and for 100 year afterwords then a true student of history will conclude that as bad as things were for blacks up North, and I will repeat that they were pretty grim, they were as bad if not worse in every Southern state.
Mass exodus to where? And with what? Laws in the South immediately after the rebellion restricted the freedom of movement for blacks. The North was hardly a beacon of warm welcome for them. They lacked the finances to move west. For the most part I imagine they stayed where they were because for better or worse it was home and a known quantity.
“If I was trying to list things for Southerners to base regional pride upon, slavery would not be on the list.”
True, but the first of the thirteen colonies to Legalize slavery was not in the south. They were Massachusetts, followed by Connecticut. For over a hundred years, slavery was not just a southern thing.
You will never convince some that true history is a little different than what you read. I remember my great grandfather telling stories about growing up in Mississippi and how it differed from what I was taught and seen on tv.
There is a good book out there Politically Incorrect Guide to the South by Clint Johnson.
Here are some points he covers:
* The first of the 13 colonies to formally legalize slavery? (Hint: it’s not in the South)
* How Georgia banned slaves - and lawyers - in its founding charter
* Why the South is more important to the American Founding than the North
* Throw away those history textbooks: How the South,not the North,started -and won — the American Revolution
* How Southerners led the way in drafting the Declaration of Independence,the U.S. Constitution,and the Bill of Rights
* Why Northerners - not Southerners - wanted slaves to be counted as property instead of people in the Constitution
* Peculiar fact about the wealthy slaveholder whose court cases helped legalize slavery in Virginia: he was black
* How Virginia militiamen created the American Midwest
* Why Northern states threatened secession long before the Confederacy - and why they considered it Constitutional
* How the expansion of the U.S. across the continent from 1830-1850 - which gave us the term “Manifest Destiny” - was largely a Southern achievement
* Lewis & Clark? Southerners,of course
* The first two Jewish members of the U.S. Senate? Yep,you guessed it
* How Southerners outnumbered Northerners almost four to one among the heroes of the Alamo
* Why slavery,which spread across all thirteen colonies,was far crueler in the North than the South
* How the Northern colonies grew rich on slave trading - and revived slavery in the South just before it collapsed
* New York City’s largest industry in 1860? The outfitting of slave ships
* The site of a mass grave for slaves who were literally worked to death? Hint: it’s not in the South
* Why economics - not slavery - was the driving force behind the War Between the States
* How Lincoln twice refused — or actually revoked — orders for emancipating slaves
* How Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation left more than 800,000 slaves in bondage in states aligned with or occupied by the Union
* Black heroes of the Confederacy - and other great Southern blacks you won’t hear about during Black History Month
* How the more civilized Southern way of war contributed to its defeat - in contrast to the North’s brutal “total war” against civilians and property
* How the Northern victory dealt a death blow to states’rights - leading eventually to today’s all-powerful federal government
* Why “Reconstruction” is the most misnamed period in American history
* Why segregation,which didn’t exist in the antebellum South,was a legacy of Northern-imposed “Reconstruction”
* How virtually all of America’s highest-ranking World War II generals had Confederate roots
* How Southerners won World War II in the Pacific theater
* How the South was making movies when Hollywood was nowhere
* Why race relations in today’s South are much better than in the North - or anywhere else in America
* What Yankee reporters don’t understand about the South
* Why faith and family come first in the South
* Why the South is naturally conservative (and the North is naturally liberal)
* Why limited government and low tax rates are a Southern tradition
* Why Northerners - white and black — keep moving South
* Statistics show Southerners are happier than people in other regions - Clint Johnson shows you why
* It’s a fact: Southern women dominate beauty pageants,and Southern men dominate in sports
* Why blacks have been moving back to the South in droves
* How American jazz,blues,and rock ‘n’ roll (when it was still music) all came from the South
* Why blacks hold more - and more powerful - political offices in the South than in the North
* Why Southern industry is booming,while the North’s is going bust
* The second war against the South — the campaign to erase memory and history - and how it serves liberal interests
* Why Southerners are overrepresented in the military - and no,it’s not poverty
* The best American literature? Southern,of course - and our high school and college reading lists confirm it
* 10 Things Southerners Don’t Understand About the North (#1: Why isn’t Ted Kennedy in prison?)
Exactly! Blacks could have moved North in 1900, no problem. But they didn’t. There was no Berlin Wall they had to cross. According to modern liberals, they were living amongst a group of racist KKK type whites who hated them, oppressed them, and held them down. And yet the overwhelming majority of them didn’t leave. Either the oppression blacks faced down here has been overstated, or the tolerant attitude of the folks outside the South has been overstated, or both.
If Connecticut or some other Yankee state had had a mass influx of blacks in 1902, to the point that they threatened to become the majority in the state, and to dominate politics, do you not think the officials there would have thrown every obstacle possible in their path? Poll taxes, literacy tests, grandfather clauses, zoning laws? Not to mention that they wouldn’t have allowed that many to come in in the first place.
I read it. Couldn’t stop laughing start to finish. I love a good comedy.
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