Posted on 10/27/2002 5:22:25 PM PST by stainlessbanner
CANTON, Ga.(AP) - H.K. Edgerton is a proud black Southerner who has no grievance with the Confederate battle flag.
And he's willing to march 1,500 miles across the South from Asheville, N.C., to Austin, Texas, decked out in a gray Civil War uniform and waving the Rebel flag to bring attention to the flag issue.
Edgerton sees the banner as a symbol of Southern heritage shared by blacks and whites rather than one of racial division.
"We were family," said Edgerton. He was in the Canton, north of Atlanta, on Saturday to visit Cherokee High School before marching west to Montgomery, Ala., on Monday.
In September, school administrators banned its overwhelming white student body from wearing to class anything depicting the Confederate battle flag.
Edgerton's "March Across Dixie" began earlier this month in Asheville, where he was a former president of the local NAACP. He's also a board member of the Southern Legal Resource Center, a nonprofit group that provides legal support to people fighting efforts to remove symbols of the Confederacy.
Edgerton blamed Northern reconstructionists for pitting blacks and whites against each other after the Civil War.
"This is Dr. Martin Luther King's dream, that we would all sit down at the same table together," he said.
But some Canton residents disagreed with Edgerton.
"He's an outsider from another state who doesn't know what he's talking about," said Krystal Thomas, a 1999 graduate of Cherokee High, where administrators in September banned students from wearing anything depicting the emblem.
"It's not the flag itself but the attitudes of the people who were wearing them," Thomas said.
Michael Julian Bond, duty director of the Atlanta NAACP, had stronger words about Edgerton's view.
"Nobody can argue with the fact we want racial harmony," Bond said in Sunday's editions of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, "but for anyone to think that the Confederate flag is a unifying symbol must be utterly mad."
Edgerton hopes to reach Austin by mid-February. He'll ask officials there to put back plaques honoring Texas Confederate veterans . The plaques were removed from the lobby of the Texas Supreme Court in 2000.
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Sure it was. What about before and during the war? From Article II, Section VII of the 1861 Georgia Constitution.
1. The importation or introduction of negroes from any foreign country, other than the slave-holding States or Territories of the United States of America, is forever prohibited.
2. The General Assembly may prohibit the introduction of negroes from any State; but they shall have no power to prevent immigrants from bringing their slaves with them.
3. The General Assembly shall have no power to pass laws for the emancipation of slaves.
That would be the same Virginia whose Constitution adopted in 1861 contained the clause, "Slaves hereafter emancipated shall forfeit their freedom by remaining in the Commonwealth more than twelve months after they become actually free, and it shall be the duty of the General Assembly to prescribe proper regulations for reducing such negroes to slavery." Now do you suppose that the men in the picture where slaves or just serving time in the army before being reduced to slavery again?
Go change yer diaper, kid.
Yeah, he and a few others like him have their heads firmly stuck an entire century and a half ago, and why they think the rest of us care so deeply as they do about their "History Channel Live" fantasies is really, truly beyond me.
Those were the GUARDS, meathead!
I noticed you didn't have any comment on the article, you chose to attack the poster. Some things never change.
As for the war -
"It's the economy, stupid."
The North was jealous of Southern prosperity and tried enacting Byzantine legislation, which would hogtie the South & promote the interests of the North. When that failed, they devised other means, including armed aggression, to achieve their ends. Finally, when the Union was losing both popular support and the war, the Northern stratagists whipped up the populace over slavery, which was previously a non-issue, and thus forever branded the South as racist in it's entirety.
A number of hisorical studies have shown that slavery in the South was steadily declining & would have died out naturally in another 20 or 30 years. The North however, couldn't afford to wait because of their declining economy.
Have faith - the times, they are a changin'.
Bingo!
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