The Confederate Flag - from a descendant of the creator

Chickasaw county sheriff. He was the only authority figure on the show that wasn’t corrupt and he was competent as hell.

Oh man, reading that wiki page led me down an old TV show rabbit hole and now I just want to watch B.J. and the Bear again.

[quote]
The first memorial to come down was the Liberty Monument, an 1891 obelisk honoring the Crescent City White League.[/quote]

[quote]
New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu has called the Liberty Monument “the most offensive of the four” to be taken down, adding it was erected to “revere white supremacy.”

“If there was ever a statue that needed to be taken down, it’s that one,” he said in an interview Sunday with The Associated Press.

The Crescent City White League attempted to overthrow a biracial Reconstruction government in New Orleans after the Civil War. That attempt failed, but white supremacist Democrats later took control of the state.

An inscription added in 1932 said the Yankees withdrew federal troops and “recognized white supremacy in the South” after the group challenged Louisiana’s biracial government after the Civil War. In 1993, these words were covered by a granite slab with a new inscription, saying the obelisk honors “Americans on both sides” who died and that the conflict “should teach us lessons for the future.”[/quote]

[quote]
People who want the Confederate memorials removed say they are offensive artifacts honoring the region’s slave-owning past. But others call the monuments part of the city’s history and say they should be protected historic structures.

Robert Bonner, 63, who said he is a Civil War re-enactor, was there to protest the statue’s removal.

“I think it’s a terrible thing,” he said. “When you start removing the history of the city, you start losing money. You start losing where you came from and where you’ve been.”[/quote]

Edit - Here’s the original 1932 inscription in full:

[quote]
McEnery and Penny having been elected governor and lieutenant-governor by the white people, were duly installed by this overthrow of carpetbag government, ousting the usurpers, Governor Kellogg (white) and Lieutenant-Governor Antoine (colored).

United States troops took over the state government and reinstated the usurpers but the national election of November 1876 recognized white supremacy in the South and gave us our state.[/quote]

I joke sometimes that I grew up in a third world country but I am glad Louisiana is able to do right by its citizens on occasion. New Orleans is a black majority city for pete’s sake, or at least it was prior to Katrina. I need to go back and see the place before it slips into the gulf.

I think I vaguely remember the 1993 thing as being hailed as a victory for inclusive history at the time – basically they were leaving up the memorial, but all the signage was going to be changed to reflect that it was a dark period in the city’s history.

This is damned hard to read. These people are delusional.

Because they are uneducated, incurious racists. Saved you a click, you’re welcome.

If you’ve traveled in central Virginia, you’ve probably seen the gigantic Confederate flag that was flying next to I64 in Louisa County. It’s one of several flags that a group called the “Flaggers” have erected across the country but mostly in Southern states. The idea is that they cannot raise the flag on public lands, but private individuals still can, so they find a like-minded person who owns property along an interstate and erect a truly massive flag visible to anyone who drives by… which of course is millions of people every day.

The one that I always see is along I95 close the VA/NC border. Like the one in Louisa County, the property is not visible from the interstate since there are some tall trees growing alongside the road, so the Flaggers put up a super-sized flagpole that towers over the treeline.

For the most part, Virginia managed to avoid these things. The trees are pretty tall, and Virginia has an ordinance about the height of structures on “agricultural” lands that limits things like flagpoles to 60 feet. For the Louisa flag, the pole was 120 feet tall, and the group got verbal permission from someone in the Louisa County government to erect it. According to the Flaggers, the pole, the base and the various guy-wires cost $11K or so.

Well, it turns out that the Virginia courts were not too impressed with their paperwork. The verbal permission of “some secretary” in a rural county courthouse does not override state ordinance, they said. The group had to reduce the height of the pole by half. So it’s no longer visible (at least in the summer) to drivers traveling to nearby Charlottesville.

I wonder what people who say ‘oh if the North had just left the South alone (which really means expand slavery into more western states), then slavery would have died out on it’s own in a few decades’ really understand about slavery. I’d say nothing at all, really. ‘If only they’d left us alone, we’d have eventually stopped brutalizing people of our own accord’.

It’s… “Interesting” that the talking points have gotten to “it wasn’t about slavery, because most Confederate soldiers didn’t own slaves personally”. Nobody even attempted to address it being about an ideology that would allow for slavery (i.e. white supremacy), despite the fact that ideology is generally what actually fuels wars.

I mean, it’s entirely to be expected.

German soldiers didn’t assassinate Archduke Ferdinand either. Hell, most of them didn’t annex Poland .

Of course there’s always one guy who can’t stop himself from blowing the cover:

“Schools are not teaching history the right way,” he says. “… It’s not whites that are the racists; it’s mostly the blacks … What it boils down to is black people are just trying to overrule us.”

“If we can’t get white people to stand together, it’s going to be another civil war,” he adds.

It’s a little silly that this article, which is about the secretive (not counting the text and video in a major newspaper) melting down of the controversial Robert E. Lee statue, keeps treating the statue like an effigy. Every time the writer mentions “cutting off Lee’s head” or “destroying Traveler, Lee’s horse”, I keep wondering if they think this statue has transubstantiated into the flesh and blood Lee and Traveler.

I am a little hazy as which of my forebears were even living in the USA during the period of Civil War, but I couldn’t help but feel some Yankee Pride watching this fiery celebration of the destruction of the traitors’ consolation prize.

https://wapo.st/40sfjWh
(Gift link)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/interactive/2023/civil-war-monument-melting-robert-e-lee-confederate/