Confederate group fighting what some call war of Southern regression

al.com ^ | 12/08/01 | ALLEN G. BREED

[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.

[unamused]

Put me on the ping list, please.

[stand watie]

count me IN!

BTW, i KNOW kirk lyons- he is NOT a racist & a pretty good guy for a LAWYER!

[Libertarianize the GOP]

Add me to the Dixie ping.
Thanks

[Non-Sequitur]

So why was he married by the Aryan Nations. Was it his wife's church or something?

[Arkinsaw]

There is nothing wrong with judging someone by association. If someone running for office went to the Bahamas with Bill and Hillary I wouldn't vote for them. Neither would I vote for John Walker due to his association with the Taliban.

I'd also not vote for anyone demonizing people with terms like "granny" or "eat, meet, and retreater" and who seeks to reduce membership in the SCV by driving out people who are not sufficiently radical for them.

If someone comes to the SCV and volunteers to "polish headstones" and has no interest in politics, going to meetings, or doing anything else then I will welcome that person as an official "headstone polisher" because the headstones of Confederate soldiers actually need polishing. If someone comes to the SCV and wants to do NOTHING but write articles for local historical publications then I will welcome them because historical articles need to be published. If someone comes to the SCV and wants to do nothing but pay his dues and hang a certificate on the wall then I will welcome him because his dues are needed and his friends need to see that certificate on the wall.

If someone wants to form a white separitist group then they should go do it and leave the rest of us out of it. If they want an organization that focuses exclusively on attacking the NAACP and excludes "headstone polishing" then go form it. They should, however, stop trying to increase dissension and argument inside the SCV and reform it into something it is not and never has been.

[PistolPaknMama]

Dixie bump!

[l8pilot]

I don't know the man, or his true motivations, but the leftist/Yankee media can rightfully point all this dirt out, and we've no defense.

I know the man, and his motivations. As a criminal defense lawyer, like Kirk, I have defended murderers...No one calls me a murderer. I have defended drug dealers, and I despise their trade, but no one would dare call me a drug dealer. Kirk Lyon's "crime" in this respect is that he successfully defended members of "politically incorrect" organisations, and got acquitals.

The media conveniently forgets that Kirk Lyons defended and represented 42 Black Branch Dividians after Waco, and was called upon by the FBI to successfully resolve the FBI-Freemen standoff in Jordan, Montana, without bloodshed. I know, because I was there with him.

The media forgets that Kirk Lyon's best friend, and a member of the Board of Advisors for the Southern Legal Resource Center, is a Black Confederate, H.K. Edgarton (who was the Ashville Chapter leader of the NAACP), and was excommunicated because he is not a rascist.

We have no way to defend ourselves?? Let's try the truth. It works.

So why was he married by the Aryan Nations. Was it his wife's church or something?

When they start attacking someone based on who they married, that is low. Kirk's wife is one of the finest ladies I have ever known. She is a wonderful wife and mother. I did a lot worse by marrying long-legged, neurotic blondes, twice.

Still, he does capture the boredom, suspicion, and exasperation that Southern Nationalism awakens in most people.

Funny you would mention that. Morris Dees, and the other "hate mongers" talk about how we "Southern Nationalists" are the most dangerous, right-wing organisation" today, not because we "advocate violence", but because of our "ideas", like: limited government, and decentralisation of power, and individual freedom. Even after September 11th, Confederate flags outnumber US flags in the ccountryside of SC, not because Southrons are unpatriotic, but because we are patriotic.

Southerners (or Southrons) have come to understand that "we are a people", and because we are a "people", we are a "nation by God's own hand", (as the song says.) Boredom? Come to the League meetings, filled with writers, academians, professionals, historians, and hungry Southrons, relearning that they have a right to be free. Suspicion? There is nothing suspicious about Southern Nationalism. The basis for it is contained in the Declaration of Independence. Exasperation? You will find none among us. Scotland, Ireland, and Wales found freedom from their centrist, English masters. Perhaps we can find freedom from our "New England" masters.

Southern nationalism is the nightmare for yankee conservatives. If we were to leave their "precious union", they would be a minority. My advice to them is: move South, learn to speak Southern, eat grits, buy guns, trade your BMW for a pickup truck, listen to country music, and, above all, don't tell us how ya'll "did it up Nawth", we don't care.

For Southern Independence

Larry Salley

[Non-Sequitur]

Had he been married in a Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish or any similar church it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows. But since he chose to be married in a church associated with the Aryan Nation then I'm going to assume that he subscribes to their beliefs and I won't apologize for it.

[l8pilot]

Had he been married in a Baptist, Methodist, Catholic, Jewish or any similar church it wouldn't have raised any eyebrows. But since he chose to be married in a church associated with the Aryan Nation then I'm going to assume that he subscribes to their beliefs and I won't apologize for it.

So, you are a member of the, "attack him for who he fell in love with camp". Let me introduce you to ex-wives: Blonde, neurotic, unfaithful, beautiful but stupid. Go chase "Miss March", or whoever.

Kirk did better than most. He has a wonderful, faithful, loving mother of his children, who is home-schooling their well behaved children as young adults. We should all be as lucky.

Your attacks are uninformed, personal slanders against a good man,and his wife and children. You ignore the service he performed for the FBI in Montana, as well as the service for the survivors in Waco and in those that avoided death in Jordan, Montana.

Where you have done nothing, Kirk Lyons has placed his life in the service of freedom.

For Southern Independence

Larry Salley

[4CJ]

""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 ..."

I don't think these groups represent what my ancestors fought for.

[HELLRAISER II]

Even though I don't respond to all, I appreciate the reading. It amazes me that the least little positive thing you say about the White race or Confederate type material, you will be labeled as a racist, I for one am tired of that kind of B.S. You can say what you want about Black power or the United Negro College Fund or BET or what ever. But the first time you mention anything with furthering rights of Whites and you are attacked. Well for you people I say this, if and when you attack understand that some of us can & will black both your eyes so you best stay out of our face.

[LadyJD]

but the leftist/Yankee media can rightfully point all this dirt out, and we've no defense. Deo Vindice. The Kid.

I suggest you re-read the article carefully.

If you are willing to throw men like Lyons to the wolves while allowing the ilk of this "writer" to quote Mo Dees & Co. favourably then you are not worthy of the heritage that you apparently would attempt to insipidly embrace.

Granny be gone.

If you run and hide every time the usual suspects shout BOO! at you by calling you a "racist" or a homophobe then you'd best leave the fighting to your betters.

Any questions?

[stand watie]

i have no idea whether he was married in that church or not-there are so MANY lies told about ALL SCV members, that i just don't know.

the naaLcp and the southern poverty law center has waged a campaign of lies,innuendos,mis-statements and pure FILTH against our organization for at least ten years. they are LIARS of the 1st order.

as an example, a PRIEST who belongs to the SCV was accused by the naaLcp of being BOTH a homosexual and of being a "notorious womanizer"! (which is SILLY-never met a homosexual that chases women-have you?)

[Non-Sequitur]

About half way through the article he defends being married by the Aryan Nation. If he isn't denying it or defending it then I suppose it's true.

I suppose that if I were the Yankee anti-christ you think I am then I should be rooting for Lyons to be appointed so I could sit back and watch the feeding frenzy. But I'm not. I hate seeing people tarred with sins that they don't deserve (which is why I disagree with you so often) and I would hate to see open season on the SCV by the mainstream press. But you have a man here with a whole hell of a lot of baggage and people are going to use that to smear the SCV. I cannot believe that somewhere in your organization there isn't someone who can provide the strong leadership and vision that you want without the Aryan Nation/KKK connection. I hope for your sake that you find him.

[stand watie]

just once more, i KNOW Kirk and he is no racist, no matter what church he either did/did not get married in.

as for his right to run for CDR of ANV, it's his right and i for one wouldn't have that THANKLESS job if they begged me to. (also as a serving CDR of the organisation i can't take sides)

no matter who wins (Kirk is NOT the only person running - at least 3 other candidates are in the race) i feel sorry for them-being an army commander is NO FUN. being a serving Brigade CDR is PITA enough-ask me,i know about that.

the liberal haters will attack WHOEVER wins because they HATE the SCV, every member and our sacred flag. that's what HATERS do-they HATE!

for dixie,sw

[Colt .45]

"and somehow I've committed a crime because I had to marry her at the Aryan Nations Church. That's guilt by association."

Gee ... what a knob head! When someone sees him hanging out with the Nazi's, and White Supremacists they tend to naturally lump him in with them. Its guys like this Lyons puke that helps to paint that big fat target on the Confederate flag. We need to get rid of ethnocentric boneheads like him, and get the people in power who want to give a true representation of what the flag is all about. His comments about mixed racial couples and immigration smack of bigotry and racism. He is bad juju for the message that we are trying to get out.

AND I sure as hell won't be sitting in the closet flying my Confederate Battle Flag!

[rebelsoldier]

Considering that a few years ago the NC Highway Patrol stopped traffic near the busy intersection next the State Fairgrounds to allow NC Central University student members of the Nation of Islam to distribute their filthy, vile, and racist screed, (I know I was there) I really don't give a shit what Morris Dees and his idiot left-wing, commie bigot henchmen in the SPLC think or say, or what their dumbass acolytes and slavish bootlickers believe. The FACT that openly racist, reactionary, and militant anti-American and anti-white organizations not only exist on taxpayer supported campuses, but are encouraged to flourish makes the concern that the SCV will be seen as embracing intolerance, utterly laughable. Leftist hate organizations abound not only on college campuses, but in public schools and government bureaucracy. How do you think nitwits like Non-Sequitur came about?

[Nellie Wilkerson]

Hear, hear!

[Nellie Wilkerson]

First, he's not running for "head" of the organization. Second, our enemies and the press are already doing what you described, so what difference will it make whether he's elected? Except that if he is, the SCV might start being more effective at preserving Confederate heritage?