For background on Selma City Council President Cecil Williamson and his ties to racist groups, read my past two diaries" Selma Times Journal's Verison of Fair and Balanced Reporting Fails" and Racist Selma, Alabama City Councilman Attends Rally Honoring the KKK Founder
Here's Williamson being interviewed by the Selma Times Journal and the word interview shold be used loosely
Williamson says that
"The League of the South was organized more or less as an academic exercise by people who were college professors primarily . . . they wrote series of articles about Southern Independence."
He went on to essentially expound upon his hope the League of the South did not become a radical group until he left the organization. Far from the truth. And that's taking Williamson's word that he actually left the organization.
examinations of writings and interviews ,by Civil War scholar Ed Sebesta, explain that the League of the South was clearly a hate group from its inception in the 1990's.
Four montHowever, hs later, on 5 May 1996, National Public Radio's Weekend Edition broadcast an interview with Southern League president and manifesto co-author Michael Hill. In response to Diane Roberts's questions about democracy, Hill said:
You know, the South has never bought into the Jacobin notion of equality. The South has always preferred a natural hierarchy. You're always going to have some violations of people's rights, for whatever reason, but we just believe that a natural social order left to evolve organically on its own would be better for everyone.
Hill's position, as we review in Chapter 4, is consistent with not only neo-Confederacy, but a nineteenth-century notion of social Darwinism. Explaining the neo-Confederate movement in London's Guardian newspaper, Roberts later wrote:
The Southern League [is] a burgeoning organisation of mostly middle-class, often academic, certainly angry, white men. . . . Their mission is to alert like-minded "neo-Confederates" to "heritage violations." . . . The Southern League's agenda is, as their board members describe it, "paleo-conservative." They want the South to return to the "order" it once had before the "disruption" of the Civil Rights Movement.
I don't think there is any question that wanting to return anything to the "order" that included Jim Crow laws should be considered hate. Wanting to return to whites only restaurants/water fountains and hotel rooms while putting blacks on the back of the Bus cannot be rationalized as anything less than hate. The Southern Poverty Law Center certainly agrees and classified the League of the South as a hate group. Also we see a strong cross-pollination of neo-confederate group membership between such groups as League of the South and Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC).
What is even more troubling about Williamson's interview is is seeming infatuation for Nathan Bedford Forrest. Williamson admires Nathan Bedford Forrest because he "saved the City of Selma". However, Forrest has an unsavory past and an account from the SPLC explains
The severest of the criticism of Forrest — subjects studiously avoided by today's neo-Confederate activists — centers on three indisputable facts:
* Forrest was a Memphis slave trader who acquired fabulous wealth before the war;
* He commanded the troops who carried out an 1864 massacre of mostly black prisoners; and
* He led violent resistance to Reconstruction as the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.
So an interesting choice of a hero for Williamson and other neo-Confederates nonetheless.
My take from Williamson's interview is that he is quite cavalier about his association with these groups. Even if he did leave the League of the South, he did so by his own admission because he was attending law school and quite busy not focusing on the "radical nature" becoming of the group. This interview does absolutely nothing to show any remorse or sensitivity to the fact that these associations may be troublesome to many in Selma. In fact, Williamson seems rather proud of his allegiances with League of the South and Nathan Bedford Forrest celebrations.
The Selma Times Journal has made it clear that they plan on as much investigative journalism in this matter as does Fox News committed to being a "fair and balanced" organization. We are going to have to rely on our own reporting and research on this matter. You are probably wondering how is that any different that what we have been doing.