Here is something that will drive Non_Sense's panties further up into her arse ;^)
I sent Marse Larry a copy of "The Tragic Era" by the Northerner, Claude Bowers, as a thank you for writing this excellent piece.
Keep the skeer on 'em!
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Here is the column which appeared today in the Lexington Herald-Leader. Larry, who happens to be black, has wanted to get this off his chest in a public forum for some time. He prepared this with black history month in mind, and the paper bit on it! It appeared on the op-ed page, and is the largest column on it. The logo which has been running all through the paper "Black History Month In Celebration" appears as an inset in the column (this is some Black history that they haven't yet seen though). – A Southerner
Headline "Black history distorted by 'political correctness' "
By Larry Sykes
As a black Southerner, I am upset when witness to "knee-jerk" attacks on white Southerners such as Merlene Davis' "Class on Slavery Teaches White Man's 'Truth'".
Davis was in quite a lather to preach that a college class claimed by an Associated Press reporter to have taught that Southern slaves were "happy" should be muzzled. Her basic reaction to the report was that Southern whites should only be allowed to teach the "evil" parts of their heritage. There was one problem she missed out on, though: the story was a hoax. Videotapes of the class proved that the AP reporter had made up the story about a history class teaching that slaves were happy. While I saw this information on AP wires, I did not see anything carried in the Herald-Leader.
Instead of seeking the truth, "politically correct" blacks have created their own "truth", in which anything that can be connected with American slavery in the Old South is entirely evil - and anything less than this race-baiting propaganda is not acceptable to teach as history. This "truth" ignores the historical facts that American slavery would not have existed without blacks selling fellow blacks into slavery, or that the first slaveholder in the American colonies was black. What seemed to scare Davis the most, though, was that anyone might actually study the "Slave Narratives", since some of what is in them won't fall in line with the revisionist history we are taught today.
Davis says that just because blacks loved the South they didn't love slavery. No one claims that they did; the important point is that most blacks did love their home - the South. Davis then correctly says that thousands of blacks fought for the Confederacy, and did so with patriotism. This is an important truth, which is actively being erased by politically correct forces.
Davis is to be commended for admitting this. She goes on, though, to speculate that blacks fought for the Confederacy because they were somehow duped by whites into doing so through a white conspiracy to keep them completely ignorant of events around them. I disagree; this is an insult to the intelligence of blacks that developed numerous methods of communication and ways to keep that information to themselves and who had eyes and ears with which they could witness the events unfolding around them. The blacks who supported the Confederacy - by keeping the farm going at home, or by supporting and fighting with the army on the front - did not do so because they were duped. They did so because their homes were being invaded - the black wives, sweethearts and sisters were being abused and raped as well as the wives, sweethearts and sisters of the white Southerners by the northern "bands of angels" in Union blue - and because their patriotism overcame the fact that they did not yet share fully in the benefits of society.. Black Confederates did reasonably expect, especially if the South had won, some reward for their patriotism.
In spite of losing the war, though, the patriotism of Confederate blacks was still often rewarded, as evidenced by the Tennessee pension records and other sources. It is today that we try to avoid honoring their patriotism. Why else would Dr. Emory Emerson, a descendant of a black Confederate soldier and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans have been "disinvited" from the services dedicating a monument which only memorialized the service of blacks in the Union army?
To end her attack, Davis says that Southerners can celebrate the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, but must always remember that men who forged this heritage were evil racists. Then she says to Southerners about their brief years as an independent nation that they are, essentially, best forgotten. My hope is we never forget when the Southern states stood up to defend states' rights and the constitution against a military invasion of the most powerful army on the planet. Just as I hope my 26 years of military service defending my country and constitution would not be forgotten, we should never forget the bravery of the Southern soldier, most of whom didn't own slaves anyway, in taking arms and giving their lives to defend their civil rights, their constitution, and their country.
The civil rights movement of the 1960's in the South would not have succeeded without brave Southern whites that joined with us. The civil rights movement was not about taking away the justifiable pride Southerners have in their heritage, but in securing constitutional guarantees for all. Blacks enjoying constitutional freedoms is not in opposition to, but rather an extension of, states securing their constitutional rights as well. Somehow, though, today what we see is a "civil rights" movement which wants to rob the South of its heritage, pride and symbols. The best way we can stop this wrong is for Southern blacks to repay the favor from the 1960's, and stand today with our Southern white friends, to protect the heritage and symbols of the South, before our common history is completely rewritten and erased by "political correctness".
* Larry Sykes, a Mississippi native and an Army Airborne veteran, lives in Lexington
We will never forget.
So true. The PC extremists despise any truth that doesn't fit their manufactured version of history. Frederick Douglass used black Confederates as part of his argument that blacks should be allowed to fight for the North. I guess the revisionists will say Douglass was a liar, and erase him from the books next.
"There are at the present moment many colored men in the Confederate army doing duty not only as cooks, servants and laborers, but as real soldiers, having muskets on their shoulders, and bullets in their pockets, ready to shoot down loyal troops, and do all that soldiers may to destroy the Federal Government and build up that of the traitors and rebels. There were such soldiers at Manassas, and they are probably there still...Rising above vulgar prejudice, the slaveholding rebel accepts the aid of the black man as readily as that of any other." - Frederick Douglass in 1861.