26th South Carolina Volunteers
(my g-g-grandfather's regimental flag)
Add this Southern Partisan to your list please.
Posted on 12/09/2001 3:44:54 AM PST by shuckmaster
RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) -- There is an uncivil war brewing within the nation's largest Confederate heritage group -- some might say a war of Southern regression.
In one camp are those who discreetly honor their rebel ancestors while working to assure others that racists have no place in their midst.
The other is represented by Kirk Lyons, a Texas lawyer who has represented members of the Ku Klux Klan, debated the merits of white separatism and taken every opportunity to battle what he calls "Southern ethnic cleansing."
At stake is the future of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, a 105-year-old organization that goes by the motto: "Honoring our veterans. Nothing more. Never less."
"Our cause and our colors are being attacked," says Charles Hawks, who is running to oppose Lyons in the race for leadership of one of the organization's three national divisions. "We cannot risk the potential damage to our organization's honor and good name by electing this candidate to a higher office."
Hawks, a 59-year-old retired North Carolina state revenue officer, was among those appalled last year when Lyons was elected councilman for the Army of Northern Virginia, giving him a seat on the SCV's general executive council. Now, the two men are battling for the coveted position of army commander. The winner, in a symbolic sense, would be the heir to Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Lyons agrees that if he wins during August's elections in Memphis, Tenn., it would represent a major change: "It would be the death knell of the bedwetters of the SCV."
From his Southern Legal Resource Center office in Black Mountain, N.C., he says, "They're the people who want to go into a closet, turn the light on once a year and fly their flag in the privacy of a broom closet. And they've never been comfortable with fighting for the flag.
"They'd just as soon polish headstones and meet, eat and retreat."
Founded in 1896 to honor Confederate dead, the SCV has prided itself on being nonprofit and nonpolitical. Lt. Gen. Stephen Dill Lee, then commander of the United Confederate Veterans, charged the successor group with "the vindication of the Cause for which we fought" and "the defense of the Confederate soldier's good name."
But it seems the group spends much of its time arguing with people about whether you can defend the Confederacy without being a racist.
In 1990, the group passed a resolution condemning hate groups. The SCV goes out of its way to point to its black members as proof of inclusiveness.
But as the Southern heritage movement grows and becomes more vocal, the SCV has found it increasingly difficult to stay on the sidelines. Groups such as the League of the South and the Southern Party are openly working toward secession, and members of those organizations have cross-pollinated the SCV.
More strident members such as Lyons are pushing the SCV to join the political fray and do more than just decorate graves and sponsor specialty license plates. The League of the South has already declared the SCV's "old guard" on its way out and the new SCV "ready to work with us as a fellow pro-South group."
Before he's even heard the complaints against him, Lyons begins to recite the "little litany of things that I've supposedly done or said or been." It starts with his 1990 marriage at the Aryan Nations Church in a ceremony performed by neo-Nazi leader Richard Butler.
"Oh! There's a crime," he says. "I fall in love with the most beautiful woman in north Idaho, who's provided me with five children. It's the smartest thing I ever did in my life, and somehow I've committed a crime because I had to marry her at the Aryan Nations Church. That's guilt by association."
Lyons has been quoted as saying that white Americans will soon become "extinct as the dodo bird" if something isn't done to slow immigration and race mixing. He has offered to broker the carving up of the country up into mini-states, each reserved for people of the same heritage.
In a recent issue of its "Intelligence Report" magazine, the Southern Poverty Law Center called Lyons a "white supremacist lawyer whose clients have been a `Who's Who' of the radical right."
Lyons dismisses each of these points as "ancient history," misquotes or comments taken out of context.
The first salvos in the SCV battle over Lyons were fired in 1998, when the group's Georgia chapter voted to send a $1,000 donation to his legal organization. After Leverett Butts and others complained about the appearance the donation created, a compromise was reached in which Lyons supporters substituted private donations.
"We were called grannies," says Butts, a retired suburban Atlanta police chief. "You'd have thought I was a Yankee infiltrator."
Lyons has been a member of the Sons for nearly a quarter century. But he really stepped into the spotlight during last year's unsuccessful battle to keep the Confederate Naval Jack -- the familiar blue Cross of St. Andrew on the red field -- flying atop the South Carolina statehouse.
"I believe that in Columbia, S.C., we gave birth to a Southern civil rights movement, and that child born then is almost two years old now," he says. "We have made great strides, but we have many more to make. And I think the SCV's role in the growth of the Southern civil rights movement is extremely important."
First, Lyons says, the SCV must continue its transformation from what, until recently, he saw as a timid, do-nothing organization.
Lyons says the SCV is where the National Rifle Association was in the 1960s, when Congress passed sweeping gun control laws. The NRA went from being a sport shooting club that focused on education to the staunchest defender of the Second Amendment, he says, and the SCV must undergo a similar metamorphosis.
"We have 31,000 members," Lyons says. "We're the most effective Confederate heritage organization in the world, but it's not enough. ... We're going to have to raise a million members. We're going to have to raise millions of dollars. We're going to have to get where the NRA is today to do this."
In the meantime, Lyons is assailing those who would violate what he sees as Southern civil rights.
His law center has filed dozens of lawsuits and complaints alleging "heritage violations," and is mailing fund-raising letters to SCV camps around the country. He recently hired as his case manager the daughter of an SCV political-action committee leader.
Lyons has filed suit against President Bush's gubernatorial staff in Texas over the removal of two Confederate plaques in the state supreme court building. And in one of the most recent cases, Lyons is seeking to establish Southern national origin status by challenging the U.S. Department of Labor's decision banning a booth for "Confederate-Americans" from a diversity day celebration.
Critics say Lyons has merely glommed on to a political cash cow.
"Guess it doesn't matter that the client is claiming origin from a nation that hasn't existed since 1865," scoffs William "Chip" Pate Jr., an SCV member who works as a marketing specialist from Pittsboro, N.C. "Lyons portrays himself basically as the cavalry coming to rescue the heritage from the heathens."
Now, Lyons has his sights set on saving the SCV from itself.
Hawks had no plans to run for the "thankless job" of commander of the SCV's Army of Northern Virginia, named for one of the three Confederate armies and covering the region from Maryland to South Carolina. But he didn't want to see Lyons win unopposed.
"In my opinion, he is not mainstream SCV," Hawks says. Without calling Lyons a racist, he adds others will see him that way and "people will perceive the SCV as a racist organization."
Lyons has the support of Russell Darden, the current commander.
Darden, a retired data processing manager from Courtland, Va., says Lyons has never expressed any racist or extremist views in his hearing.
"When you're in front leading the battle, you're going to get hit right straight forward," he says. "We just need more people like Kirk."
James Turner, a former commander of the Army of Tennessee, another SCV region, says he was worried about some of the things he'd heard of Lyons and his clientele. But Turner says Lyons sat down with him and addressed every one of those concerns to his satisfaction.
"They paint him with a tar brush, but it doesn't apply," says Turner, a Nashville, Tenn., accountant and architectural software distributor.
Lyons says it's the left-wingers that are stoking the controversy about him. But some of the loudest cries aren't coming from the liberal left -- or from the outside.
"My credentials as a conservative are impeccable," says Gilbert Jones, a Greensboro restaurateur and commander of the SCV's Northern Piedmont Brigade.
Jones says Lyons' election to commander would be a signal that "the radicals would be in control of the SCV." He worries it might already be too late.
At this year's convention of the Military Order of Stars and Bars, a group for descendants of Confederate officers, Jones warned attendees that the SCV needs to clean house.
"I think we ought to take the neo-Nazis, the white supremacists and the skinheads and show them to the door," he told the assembly in Lafayette, La., which included Lyons. The reaction, he says, spoke volumes.
"I'll tell you, about half the room went quiet," Jones says. "I got some good applause, but some color left some faces in the room.
"I don't believe we can defend our ancestors' honor with dishonorable people."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Allen G. Breed is the AP's Southeast regional writer, based in Raleigh.
26th South Carolina Volunteers
(my g-g-grandfather's regimental flag)
Add this Southern Partisan to your list please.
By not taking a leadership role for Souhtern Heritage, the SCV may be leaving itself open to opportunists who sense the voids and use weaknesses to promote their agenda. Hopefully, Mr Lyons motives are to improve the SCV.
Really now, what's it to ya?
The "tolerant" left already does. That's why the NAACP fights the SCV license plates. They will see the SCV as a racist organization no matter who is elected.
If his bid does nothing but jolt these grannies into fullfilling the SCV pledge, then so be it. Unlike their ancestors, the SCV has cowered at every battle. They and the UDC may be the bloodline of the Confederacy, but they certainly are not connected in spirit.
My g-g-g-grandfather's Regimental Flag
Please add me to the ping list
I'm neither leftist nor Yankee but the following says it all for me:
Before he's even heard the complaints against him, Lyons begins to recite the "little litany of things that I've supposedly done or said or been." It starts with his 1990 marriage at the Aryan Nations Church in a ceremony performed by neo-Nazi leader Richard Butler.If this had been a 1960 marriage I might be inclined to cut a little slack. But, by 1990 everybody knew what a POS Richard Butler and his organization were.
Get rid of him.
America's Fifth Column ... watch PBS documentary JIHAD! In America
Download 8 Mb zip file here (50 minute video)
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