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.
Young Thomas will have a glowing career with the 'Thought Police'.
My source says...
"By 1835 the Cherokee were divided and despondent. Most supported Principal Chief John Ross, who fought the encroachment of whites starting with the 1832 land lottery. However, a minority(less than 500 out of 17,000 Cherokee in North Georgia) followed Major Ridge, his son John, and Elias Boudinot, who advocated removal. The Treaty of New Echota, signed by Ridge and members of the Treaty Party in 1835, gave Jackson the legal document he needed to remove the First Americans. Ratification of the treaty by the United States Senate sealed the fate of the Cherokee. Among the few who spoke out against the ratification were Daniel Webster and Henry Clay, but it passed by a single vote. In 1838 the United States began the removal to Oklahoma, fulfilling a promise the government made to Georgia in 1802. Ordered to move on the Cherokee, General John Wool resigned his command in protest, delaying the action. His replacement, General Winfield Scott, arrived at New Echota on May 17, 1838 with 7000 men. Early that summer General Scott and the United States Army began the invasion of the Cherokee Nation.
I'm not saying that the South wasn't a participant in the removal of the American Indians. I'm just trying to point out that we as a Nation are not without sin.
yes, that is just what I am
and for this land of freedom
I do not give a damn
I'm glad we fought against them
I only wish we'd won
and I do not ask no pardon
for anything I've done!
snip.. "In May of 1832 Sac and Fox Indians under the leadership of Black Hawk left the Iowa territory and returned to their homes across the Mississippi River in northern Illinois. These Native Americans had lost their Illinois lands in a disputed treaty signed in St. Louis in 1805. Their return to northern Illinois sparked widespread panic among white settlers, and Illinois Governor Reynolds quickly called up the militia, which included a young Abraham Lincoln.
Both the militia and regular army troops proved unable to locate the elusive Indians at first, but by July they had begun to pursue Black Hawk's band across northern Illinois and southwestern Wisconsin, engaging them in a major conflict at Wisconsin Heights before finally routing the Indians at Bad Axe on the Mississippi River.
This project presents searchable primary source materials describing the Black Hawk War of 1832. It includes the Autobiography of Black Hawk, American soldiers' first-hand accounts and reminiscences, maps and other images, and treaties and other government documents. It is a part of the larger Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project and its attempts to use the events of Lincoln's life as a lens through which to interpret and understand broader themes of antebellum American history.
The Illinois Humanities Council has supported this project with a generous grant.
© 2000 Abraham Lincoln Historical Digitization Project
"Local operations began on May 18, 1838, mostly carried out by Georgia Guard under the command of Colonel William Lindsey. The first Cherokee round-up under orders from United States General Winfield Scott started on May 25, 1838 with General Charles Floyd in charge of field operations."
Your comment,"I never denied that such actions occured in the North, only your implication in Reply 33 that only Northerners were capable of it."
My post #42,"I'm not saying that the South wasn't a participant in the removal of the American Indians. I'm just trying to point out that we as a Nation are not without sin."
free the southland,sw
HK is a FRIEND of mine & a GREAT southron gentleman of the best sort. you, otoh, are not fit to wipe his boots.
free dixie,sw
if all the racists from the various groups like the SPLC/naaLcp & ALL the damnyankees & scalawags would leave, we southrons would ALL get along.
every day that passes, more & more black southrons cleave to the TRUE CAUSE of southron LIBERTY & the southron flag!
free dixie,sw
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