Posted on 07/14/2005 6:10:21 AM PDT by robowombat
Bias against Southerners misses the mark By RICHARD COX Published July 11, 2005
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Does prejudice exist in Pasco County, an area with a very diverse population and seemingly very progressive?
I am certain that African-Americans, Hispanics and people from other countries, the poor and homeless, as well as members of certain religious faiths, experience treatment different from the mainstream populace. However, I am a member of a minority who has experienced attitudes and reactions from many individuals who assume that I am intellectually and socially challenged.
A very large percentage of the population of New Port Richey in particular is from the Northeast. I personally like the outspokenness, mince-no-words attitude, the ability to criticize as well as accept criticism without being offended, that seems to represent the culture in which Northerners grew up.
My family members seem to have the disadvantage of being born and living most of our lives in the South, in our case, Tennessee. I grew up in Knoxville, a city that many people seem to associate only with the fanatical behavior of our college football fans, and my wife is from a small city near Chattanooga.
There still seems to be a stereotype that some people associate with Tennesseans. When those individuals heard the distinct accent of my wife, my stepdaughter, and myself, it seemed to conjure up that redneck image one might associate with the humor of Jeff Foxworthy and other Southern comedians. That image is of a culture of ignorant hillbillies (certainly due to inbreeding!), barefoot, living in a shack with no indoor plumbing (but certainly an outhouse in back), having a dog living under the front porch, and owning an overgrown lawn populated with broken-down, dilapidated automobiles. And, yes, we all chew tobacco and sit on the front porch swing playing the banjo. Everyone also flies a Confederate flag and reminisces about the War Between the States.
I first noticed this attitude when my stepdaughter, an honor student, came home from middle school several days in tears because several other students harassed her daily, calling her an ignorant redneck and hillbilly among other derogatory terms. My wife and I have experienced the sudden change in facial expressions from many when they hear our accent. They seem to associate our accent with ignorance, and speak in simpler terms so that we can understand what they are saying. Telephone conversations often produce the same reaction.
I beg to differ. Tennessee is the home of several major universities, four major metropolitan areas with all the drug and gang problems associated with other large cities, and the most visited national park in the United States. Oak Ridge, in the Knoxville area, probably has as high a percentage of residents with doctorate degrees as any city in the United States. Tennessee has a musical heritage equal to none, and it is not exclusively country or bluegrass genres. Many nationally prominent politicians are from my home state, including three former presidents.
Tennessee has produced many famous musicians, actors, scientists and other intellectual and talented natives.
Well, to set the story straight, rural areas of most states have their own populace and dwellings that approach this stereotype.
My wife and I grew up in your average suburban neighborhoods, we both graduated from major universities and had successful professional careers, and, to risk seeming boastful, are probably as intelligent and knowledgeable, if not more so, than the average American. Believe it or not, East Tennessee, the section of the state we are from, fervently supported the Union during the Civil War.
I have noticed in the Pasco Times notices of meetings for various groups from areas of the Northeast and from other countries. Perhaps Southerners in our area should form a similar group. With apologies to an African-American group with a similar title, we could call our group the NAASF, the National Association for the Advancement of Southern Folks, Pasco County Branch. I hope there are enough local Southern residents available to attract to our organization.
--Richard Cox, a retired middle school science teacher and department head, lives in New Port Richey
Remember you said: "Maybe Osama is just a 'Good Ole Rebel' too."
IMHO, you should really think about withdrawing this inflammatory and unhelpful analogy.
So how do you feel about the Battle Hymn of the Republic, which celebrates the mass-murderer John Brown, and the ethnic cleansing of the South?
I think the best course for the deep South interests would be to unite with the Douglas wing of the Democratic party. Douglas would have given them everything they could have wanted except virulent support for the expansion of the slave empire. But they loved their peculiar institution and wanted all or nothing. They apparently saw the Union as worthless if it didn't give them everything they wanted. It's a shame the secessionist tail wagged the dog.
Whatever Lincoln did later would have been moot had the hotheads not had their disastrous temper tantrum.
I think there were guys like Stephens and Wade who truly hated Southerners. I have no use for generalized hate for groups of fellow Americans. John Brown was a murderer that had to be stopped. But I don't see that song advocating the "ethnic cleansing" of the South but rather the social cleansing of the country from slavery. Ethnic cleansing is mass murder. Social cleansing is not murder. As far as the song deals with the cleansing of the evil of slavery, I'm all for it. If you show me where it explicitly glorifies the killing of fellow Americans like Randolph's song did, I'll disown those parts.
I know that nobody on this board who advocates the Confederate cause has the least bit of sympathy for Osama. I wasn't meaning to say that and if it appears to some that I was trying to say that, I apologize. But again, you could put many of Randolph's words into Osama's mouth. And if uncompromising hate made Randolph a "Good Ole Rebel", why not Osama?
At least Randolph had a bit of excuse in that he was close to the events. But today 140 years later, we need to rise above regionalism and be thankful we are one people and can provide a united front against those who would destroy us.
Really? I hadn't thought of it that way.
I like your use of the word "divisiveness" -- you use it exactly the way the liberals do, when somone actually has the temerity to disagree with them. It sounds like a whine to me, but then that's just me.
But let's see what a Texas historian had to say about the beginnings of Reconstruction, and see if your theory of "gentle fate" and planter-class whininess parses with his recounting.
There was no formal surrender in Texas after Palmito Hill [="Palmitto Springs/Ranch"]. The Confederate army and state government simply melted away.Generals Kirby-Smith, Magruder, Slaughter, and Governor Murrah all took refuge in Mexico. The soldiers disbanded and went home. Human detritus from the war filled the roads and clustered in the dusty towns. The blaze of courage had burned out; the Southern sun had long passed high noon; everywhere there was a stunned feeling of despair. The people had put too much into the war, and were sapped.
The returning soldiers were scarred by bitterness, not only at defeat but by a gnawing feeling that their sacrifices had not been shared. Inept and unscrupulous politicians had wasted the South's resources, while the home front had let them down during the war. In mass meetings at La Grange and in Fayette County, soldiers seized and distributed Confederate and state property to indigent military families. Stores in San Antonio were pillaged; the state treasury was robbed. All government had collapsed. However, property in private hands was not molested by the veterans, bitter as they were.
The great mass of poor farmers in the corn belt were sullen about the present and frightened for the future. In 1865 almost every farmer in Texas could be classified as "poor white." All progress had ceased for a total of four years. The farmers had borne the brunt of the bloodshed and sweat during the war; they now tended to blame their troubles on the slaves. The hatred of Negroes above the falls of the Brazos and Colorado was a flaming thing.
The planter class was demoralized. Its entire capital, moral and financial, had been shot away. The Southern way of life had received a stunning defeat, not quickly, not cleanly, but through a degrading conflict of attrition. All money, deposits, and bank stocks of this class were gone, as well as their prime source of wealth, their Negro slaves. The loss of illusions and ideals was profound.
The economy and future of Texas lay in ruins. Fully one-fourth of the productive white male population was dead, disabled, or dispersed. Almost every form of wealth, except the land itself, was dissipated or destroyed. The world was not to see such wholesale ruin again until the wars of the next century.
On June 19, 1865, General Gordon Granger of the Union Army landed in Texas....Thousands of bluecoats arrived in Texas; 52,000 were sent to the border areas alone. This force was meant to overawe the French. The other thousands congregating along the coast were sent as a show of force to keep order in the state. None of these troops proceeded to the old Indian forts; few marched to the interior. They camped in the centers of population in the east. There was no opposition. All Texans conceded that the main war issue -- secession -- was dead, killed by force of arms. Nor was there any real opposition to the end of slavery, which had become a driving force behind the Union crusade.
Thousands of Texans watched Union soldiers march through the state with fife and drum; men, women, and small children saw miles of bayonets go by. A certain sense of history, which is more the remembrance of humiliations and defeats than recollected glories, entered the Texan soul, in a way non-Southern Americans never understood. Few Texans saw the fact that the big battalions had won as "right." They had fought valiantly for the right as they saw it, for the Constitution as their people construed it, and for liberty as Texans felt it. The Texas saying, "If Goliath had been a Yankee, little David would have lost," expressed more than a thousand words.
The Texasns were stubborn and prideful people; they consciously thought of themselves as a powerful, conquering race. Their ancestors had beaten the British and defied the world. They had conquered Mexicans and driven out Indians. Now, they were the conquered. Few Texans then living saw things any other way; the Northern enthusiasm that the war had been a war for democracy had no currency. In 1861, Texas had been an Anglo-Saxon democracy, too.
The knowledge of defeat was bitter, but the coming humiliations were worse. The state was placed under military rule. Army tribunals replaced the civil courts -- not without some justice, since no Union man or Negro could hope for fairness from a Texas jury. Army officers were able to act as they saw fit. The great majority of commanders acted reasonably and kept their troops within bounds. A significant number did not. More galling than the actual atrocities, however, was the fact that many Northerners took an almost sadistic pleasure in demeaning or ridiculing the pretensions and folkways of the Southern race.
The great majority of the high-minded young men from Massachusetts or Illinois who had saved the Union went home; few idealists, in any age, seek occupation duty.
This was one of the great tragedies of the era. The North was superbly equipped to win the conflict; it was poorly prepared to usher in the peace. Thousands of occupation troops in Texas were composed of Negro regiments. In every locality where Negroes were stationed, there was trouble, without exception. The public could not bar them, but it refused to accept them. Texans took the other side of the street to avoid passing them; women spat on the ground they trod. Men who made gestures of defiance, or who appeared in public in remnants of gray uniforms, were arrested.
Union officers were pariahs, and some reacted bitterly to this. At Victoria, the Negro garrison terrorized the town. Its white officers refused to let any professed Union man or Negro be jailed by local citizens for any offense. At Brenham, Negro troops burned down the town. No soldier or officer was ever brought to trial or admonished for this act. Other Union soldiers raided Brownsville. Men who were, or posed, as Union sympathizers could get almost any favor from the occupation forces. Men who were known Confederates, which included 90 percent of the population and all its local leadership, were frequently humiliated publicly, if they came hat in hand to beg some favor of the occupying army.
None of this was historically unusual in the aftermath of war; in all fairness, few occupying armies ever stayed within such bounds. There was almost no looting of private property, and few executions for any reason. But this kind of thing hadn not happened to Americans before, and few people in the North ever understood its full effect. The great American misfortune was not that it happened so much as that it was to go on so long. In Texas, outside rule was to last not a few months, but for nine long years. These years seeded for a century certain hatreds, fears, distrusts, and suspicions....
A more troubling problem [for the February, 1866, convention attempting to reconstitute the State of Texas, using the 1845 constitution as a basis] was the question of the new civil status of the former slaves. This was a problem for the North, for all its commitment to freedom and pressure toward equality, never really understood or faced in the 19th century. Its own Negro population was minuscule. There was complete agreement in Texas that slavery was dead. But it was politically impossible for Texans to consider giving the freedmen full citizen rights. The remembrance of slavery was one factor, but the actual class status of the blacks was equally, or more, important......They were a bottom group, the lowest of the low, who had never participated in society or government.....The educated and higher social classes in Texas took it for granted that the Negro was inherently inferior to the white; they could justify it....if forced to articulate. To whites lower in the social scale, it was not only a matter of truth but an article of faith.....
...It had taken the bloodiest conflict in modern times to make the Negroes free; it would have taken a social cataclysm of the most immense proportions to give the Negroes equality. In all times and places there were only three ways by which greatly differentiated peoples had lived together: as slave or serf and master; by miscegenation; or by some system of caste.....
The new Texas constitution ignored the Thirteenth Amendment, which freed the slaves but also carried definite connotations of Negro equality. Freedmen were recognized as having status at law, with the right to hold private property. They had rights before a jury, with one exception: no Negro could testify in court in cases involving whites. They were specifically denied the right to vote.
John Reagan, who had been Postmaster General of the Confederacy and who had recently returned from detention in the North, repeatedly warned the convention that the state shoud make some token step toward Negro suffrage, such as giving the ballot to freedmen who could read and write. Reagan wrote that the North was in an ugly mood, and there was much sentiment for Negro equality; a little compromise could turn away much wrath. Texans treated this view with derision.
They had reason to. In 1866 Negro equality was by no means a Northern commitment. The evidence that it was not abounded.....The Yankee army displayed continual overt evidences of discrimination and even hatred for the Negro throughout the war, as letters and diaries attest. In the occupation forces, Texans had seen ample evidence of a sneering, patronizing attitude toward former slaves.....
More concrete, throughout the war there had been riots directed against Negroes in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and New York. The majority of Western states had passed laws prohibiting Negroes from settling.....Only five states permitted Negro suffrage. In 1865 Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Connecticut voted down referenda giving Negroes the ballot; the Nebraska consitution of 1866 limited voting to whites. Four major Northern states were to pass similar legislation within two years....[quotes Sen. Charles Sumner and Horace Greeley as favoring restrictions on black franchise].....The Presidential recommendation to the South requested that, at the least, any franchise be limited by literacy qualifications.
Few Texans, other than John H. Reagan, realized that the North was rapidly moving toward a double standard of enforcing Negro equality both as a political and punitive measure. Nowhere, probably was this to be better expressed than in Thaddeus Stevens' equation of slave-owning with sin, with a required expiation by the humiliation of Negro equality, not ignoring the "Party purpose."
-- T. R. Fehrenbach, Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans (1968, 1983), pp. 393-400, passim. [Emphasis in last graf supplied.]
Want to talk about "truth"? And riots? See my last.
Don't be bashful. Tell us, who on this board advocates "the Confederate cause"? Name names, please, and explain why you think so.
No drive-by's, please.
How does the 1860 Republican platform of "we're going to take over the entire government, do as we please, make you pay for it, destroy your ability to get a living, spend all your money on ourselves, and burn down your State if you don't like it" play today, do you think?
the BOR specifically gives ENUMERATED powers to the federal government. NONE of those enumerated powers is the power to attempt to forbid a FREE state or states from lawfully LEAVING the union, peacefully.
may i suggest that you go read the 10th Amendment???
secession was/IS lawful.
free dixie,sw
The troops guarding Houston disappeared on May 23, 1865, as these old posts of mine below indicate. The information came from the Galveston Daily News.
The agenda was capture of the national patrimony and government and the use of the national government as an organ of Party, or faction if you will (in the Madisonian sense), and the use of Negro franchisees in the South only as political enforcers of the Northern Republican dispensation through black rule of the South. You want cites and quotes, I got 'em. That was the Radical program.
PITY.
you are the laughingstock of FR. don't you care that you are being ridiculed as an empty-headed DUNCE, by everyone who has an education or a functioning brain????
free dixie,sw
he usually consumes a 1/2 case per football GAME!
not even i, who is a "DP-addict", drink that much in 3 hours!
free dixie,sw
I have not seen that. I'll keep a look out for that.
in fact in about 20 years your kids will deny that their family was EVER anything BUT pure-born dixie folk.
that is the ultimate "comeuppance" for northerners, who emigrate to the southland.
it's happened to SEVERAL friends of mine.
free dixie,sw
considering that the damnyankees MURDERED TENS of THOUSANDS of UNarmed (mostly NON-white!) civilians & helpless POWs, i'd think they'd "ditch" that song forthwith.
but then DAMNyankees have always been cruel,arrogant, self-righteous & brutal. it seems to be their NATURE.
free dixie,sw
I got no use for the Wade-Stephens program. Too many of those radicals hate nothing but hate. Too bad Lincoln was shot. But you can't blame Booth's deed on the Yankees.
ONLY the slave-owners (5-6% of BOTH northern & southern citizens) and a FEW thousand abolitionists "cared a damn about the plight of the slaves".
they SHOULD have cared. they did NOT!
the WBTS, despite 150 years of self-righteous, arrogantly FALSE, damnyankee propaganda was NEVER about slavery.
even GEN U S Grant said that the war was ONLY to "preserve the union".
surely you're smart enough to know THAT simple fact.
free dixie,sw
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