Suppose there were other similar examples of former Confederate states flying a flag to respect their ancestral heritage of a lost cause.
Consider, just for instance, that California, Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Tejas, flew the flag of Mexico on their state capitols, on the insistence of Hispanics, to honor the heritage and valor of their lost cause.
They too are still living on the land lost in a war of much more dubious origin. The war with Mexico was far more a war of “northern aggression,” than any other.
Would Southerners show any similar sympathy for their cause? Imagine.
The Confederacy was an enemy nation that was defeated. Flying an enemy flag on official US government property, local, state, or federal, is anti-Constitutional and treasonous.
Ban the Confederate flag from all government property:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/...
I had a radically a-typical childhood for a White American male. Growing up in Brazil, I had the luxury of assuming that all races and cultures could live together in peace and harmony – because that is what I saw all around me – before returning to the cultural Hell of Oklahoma in 1967.
My classmates were from Japan, Singapore, Argentina, New Zealand and several European countries besides some local Brazilians. It was an American school that prepared students for American school systems for the many families that moved back and forth. I was once tutored in math in the back room of a Japanese produce store in our neighborhood. She did not know much English and I did not know any Japanese. We struggled through algebra in our limited Portuguese. Our immediate neighbors also included Japanese, Chinese, Dutch, Greek and Italian families. The most popular TV show was a music/comedy variety show hosted by a Black man and a White woman.
That was my “normal,” that I have never managed to find again.
After the Civil War, a group of disgruntled Confederates emigrated to Brazil to continue the plantation culture. That ended in 1888 when Brazil freed their slaves. The community still exists, though it is nothing like what it was hoped to be and they eventually inter-married into the local mixed race population.
http://cwmemory.com/...
This is the only first-hand account of Vila Americana I have ever seen. I looked it up on Wikipedia several years ago trying to figure out what it was from my hazy memories. I grew up in Sao Paulo from 1959-67 and the mother of one of my classmates was from Vila Americana.
http://narrative.ly/...
We went to Vila Americana once in 1966. It was on a festival day and there was a parade. Dad surprised everyone by riding a horse, in full uniform and waving a saber shouting, "The South shall rise again!" He was riding a grey horse that was supposed to be just like Traveler, the one General Robert E. Lee rode.
Her four sons and my brother and I used to go over to each other's house for play dates a lot. The oldest was my age and was always wanting to re-enact Civil War battles. Dad used to hang out with mostly Southern people socially. Southerners were more accepting of his attitudes than others at card parties and other social occasions with the American Society there.
My 6th grade teacher was a Black man from South Africa. Dad used to run down Mr. Naidoo at home at the dinner table with the typical slurs. It really bothered him that I had a Black teacher and there was nothing he could do about it. He seemed to know not to talk like that in front of other people. It had to be too absurd to be true. No one else we knew sounded like that.
We had already had a few Black maids by then and it never made any sense to me. Live-in maids and housekeepers were very common in Brazil because laundry was still done by hand and carpet was rare and wood and tile floors had to be stripped and polished regularly. We lived in a working class neighborhood and most homes had maids. One who worked for us for a couple of years was a German refugee who still had to take time off to have shrapnel removed. Her Brazilian husband worked in the machine shop across the street.
I remember Mr. Naidoo telling us to pay attention to the Civil Rights movement for Current Events presentations. He told us he had emigrated to Brazil from Johannesburg so he could teach kids of all races because he was not allowed to teach white kids in South Africa, or even in the US at the time. That made a big impression on me because that was where we lived and he was talking about my relatives.
My maternal grandfather died in 1965 when he was 88, just a few weeks after we came back from our second vacation in the States. Mom flew back for the funeral and when she returned, she told us the n-----s were taking over everything because now they had Civil Rights. The town she was from in Western Oklahoma only allowed blacks within the city limits during business hours and didn't have to change until 1965. He had also been a general contractor who built cotton gins in Southern Oklahoma.
He once had a cotton farm and lost his left arm in a cotton gin just below the shoulder. He walked over a mile home before passing out. I was told he was also fluent in the Choctaw language from using members of the local tribe in his cotton fields. I have very few memories of him, being very old, chewing tobacco and not being very interested in us kids. He was born in 1877 and was already too old for the First World War.
There was a lot of teasing in our family and I was never sure how serious dad was until we came back. It just seemed too absurd to be real. I remember the day MLK was assassinated. It was on the news when mom came in from the grocery store. She actually cheered in my face, "Hooray, somebody finally shot that n-----!," then sent me to my room when I talked back. Nothing like that had ever happened before. What could make my own mother cheer that a Baptist preacher had been killed? I was so young and naiive, not wanting to believe what was becoming obvious.
They also weren't too upset when Bobby Kennedy was killed a couple of months later. We came back in June of 1967, "The Summer of Love." They supported George Wallace in 1968, then became Republicans. I saw why the Democrats lost the South by supporting Civil Rights. America was nothing like what I had believed it was. I was suddenly alienated from all my relatives who saw me as a foreigner. Everyone regretted that I had grown up in Brazil and no one wanted to hear anything good about it.
I really believed that my generation was going to change things and I knew I had to take a stand and do whatever I could when I had a chance, even if it meant being alienated from the rest of my family. There was never any chance I could be like them anyways. Vietnam was blowing up and my cousin was over there. I was just barely too young for the draft and 4F anyways. By then, it was clear the government had lied about it. All this happened the first year we were back. I actually thought all that stuff had finally been settled by electing Jimmy Carter.
We had all been at home in Sao Paulo in November, 1963, when a Brazilian worker at the machine shop across the street ran over to tell dad that JFK had just been shot. We all watched TV, mourned and were sad together that week. Everything was different now. I was in Oklahoma and mourned alone for MLK and RFK.
I was a freelance photojournalist when Arizona finally passed an MLK holiday, (just so they could get the Super Bowl in 1995), I covered the first MLK Breakfast sponsored by a newly established cultural diversity center in Scottsdale. No city officials bothered to attend or to RSVP. The story I wrote ended with a line that said city officials could not be reached for comment because they had the day off for the new MLK holiday. That area had never been challenged like that in a local newspaper. I felt the all too familiar scorn of other Whites. A year after I left Arizona, a new director of that diversity center had his fingers blown off by opening a package left by the local KKK.
I also covered a group of Buffalo Soldier re-enactors in Arizona for five years and published the stories regularly in one of the most conservative newspapers in the state. The director's wife was actually a direct descendant of Geronimo. I went back to AZ in 2000, when I was invited to cover the first ever “Gathering of the People,” cultural reunion at the original Fort Apache on the White Mountain Apache reservation. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar had been the basketball coach there that year and helped to facilitate the event.
The story only appeared in the tribal newspaper because no one else was interested after Kareem got busted for pot in LA the day after it ended and that became a bigger national story. The next summer, a white kid died at one of their camps and the director ended up going to prison for six years after a second trial. A dozen kids had died at summer camps in America during the previous fifteen years, but no other camp director got more than a little probation. He was the only Black camp director.
There was a Dateline NBC special on it. He had already acquired the rights to some state land and had an architect working on plans and was raising money to build an actual fort for his Buffalo Soldier youth program, right off I-17 outside Phoenix. Much too uppity for Joe Arpaio's Arizona.
They surprised me with a special humanitarian award in 1998 at a public ceremony for all my work and all I could think to say was to tell the kids there that when I was their age, I actually had a Black teacher in Brazil and dedicated the award to Mr. Naidoo, wherever he is.
I was hoping that he had been a relative of Kumi Naidoo, the president of Greenpeace. Kumi said he did not know of him, but that is a common name in Johannesburg.
