Posted on 04/07/2011 12:29:39 PM PDT by smokingfrog
COLUMBIA — Waving the Confederate flag from the state Senate chamber floor, Charleston Democrat Sen. Robert Ford declared that blacks and whites should come together as South Carolina remembers the Civil War.
Ford, who is black, said that before the war, his ancestors were slaves. After the war, they were free men and women.
“Doesn’t that give me a reason to celebrate?” Ford said. “What it means is the war was able to unite America.”
Ford’s comments come as the nation marks the 150th anniversary of the attack on Fort Sumter next week and the start of the Civil War.
Dot Scott, president of the Charleston NAACP, said she won’t be celebrating with Ford, nor does she expect most African Americans to do that.
“I think that statement is ludicrous,” Scott, who is black, said. “Had the Confederate states not fought, the slaves would still have been free, because that’s what they were fighting for, to not let that happen. Had they not fought, thousands and thousands and thousands of soldiers on both sides would not have died.”
The Rev. Joe Darby, vice president of the Charleston NAACP, said Ford should hold a town hall meeting in his district.
“Senator Ford needs to start reflecting the views of his constituents,” Darby said. “I think he lives in his own universe.”
(Excerpt) Read more at postandcourier.com ...
This link doesn’t work.
Sounds to me like this senator has got it figured out. Why is he a Democrat?
A fact that is not fully understood by the NAACP today. You would think it was the 1850's the way they talk about the "conditions" they have to endure in a white America. For crying out loud it isn't even like the south in the 1950's.
A remarkably even-handed view of the conflict. Very rare these days.
He may be a Democrat, but that hasn’t stopped the NAACP from calling him an Uncle Tom for just now thinking such unauthorized and unapproved thoughts.
Sounds like he thinks for himself, something I respect even from a Dem.
Works for me. I just checked it again. The page does load kind of slowly though.
Even as a democrat, good luck with that. The civil war and the abolition of slavery is not something that his party of slavery and the KKK likes to celebrate.
Dirty little secret the NAACP does NOT want folks to know:
There are quite a few black folks like Robert Ford throughout the South who are very active and very much enjoy in participating in reenactments of battles and exploring the history of the Civil War. To them, there is NOTHING racist about it learning of ones heritage.
I wonder if his attackers believe that the South would have voluntarily given up slavery. The answer is “NO”.
Harry Turtledove’s alternate history run at the Civil War is good reading, and makes a thinking person do some more thinking.
The Rev. Joe Darby, vice president of the Charleston NAACP, said Ford should hold a town hall meeting in his district.
“Senator Ford needs to start reflecting the views of his constituents,” Darby said. “I think he lives in his own universe.”
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We got to get to that Negro and straighten his black butt up.
Don’t he know we hate the White man? His Mammy and Pappy didnt teach him nuthin’.
Give me a week with him and I will have him wearing a Black Panther uniform and threatening voters at polling places.
"In Charleston, South Carolina in 1860 125 free Negroes owned slaves; six of them owning 10 or more. Of the $1.5 million in taxable property owned by free Negroes in Charleston, more than $300,000 represented slave holdings." From the article
DIXIE'S CENSORED SUBJECT
BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
By Robert M. Grooms
1999
Anyone who is beholding to the government for the necessities is a slave. 150 years after the War of Norther Aggression started, we are STILL trying to free blacks from the DemocRats.
The proximate cause of the crash which brought this period to an end and ushered in a global depression lasting 6-10 years depending on the country and decades of low financial return on most investments was the demonetization of silver by both the new German Empire and the US. The Grant administration ws concerned with the escalating inflation that rapid monetary growth was causing and enacted both a silver demonetization act and Treasury Department tight money policies to discourage easy credit.
These actions and possibly the machinations of Jay Gould led to the collapse of Jay Cooke the second largest bank in the US as this firm was just about to launch a $300M bond issue to cover the major construction of the second transcontinental railway, the Northern pacific. (The Gould connection comes from the indication Gould was shorting both Cooke and the NP, even though he was the largest share holder in the NP with the expectation of making a quick and vast killing by buying up depressed NP shares for a fraction of their value and being able to get control of Cook's bank in the same fashion. Cooke had frozen Gould out of the profits from the bond sales and wouldn't participate in any joint activities with Gould. Gould did not expect the crash to be as severe as it was and quietly cut a low profile in financial circles as the financial and stock markets virtually imploded in a matter of days after Cooke declared bankruptcy.)
The Crash of ‘73 flattened staple agriculture prices world wide. Most would not regain the same levels until the Spanish American War, the Boer War and the Yukon gold rush fired up demand in the world economy. For the South and the wheat belt these events had a protracted impoverishing effect. Had slavery been in effect in the US the slave owners would have found themselves upside down in the same fashion as many home owners are today with a vastly over priced stock of labor, a very expensive mode of production and a plummeting price for the product they were selling. Inherently labor and production costs would over time doom slavery. Planters as did Russian landlords would have been converted into an interest group pressing ‘compensated manumission’. If this had not occurred over time the force of economic realities would have driven the plantation economy towards manumission and a semblance of freedom but a continuation of economic servitude. Pretty much what happened in the South after 1865. The huge trauma of the war would have been absent and potentially the intensity of racial feelings in the South would have been much less. In other words what would have happened over a period of decades would have been a slow decompression rather than a violent explosion.
Hindsight is 20/20. As it was, in 1860 the Southern slaveocracy saw their institution as something they would hand on to their children and grandchildren. And important enough to secede over and launch a war to protect.
To your conclusion, I have to say “perhaps.” Power hangs on to power.
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