Oh boy! Goodie! Goodie! Goodie! If y’all keep throwin’ ‘em, I’ll keep hittin’ ‘em. Up next: Georgia State Representative Tommy Benton. According to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “Massa Benton” appears to be pretty annoyed with all the goings-on over Confederate symbols in the South and he is here to let y’all know he is not having ANY of it:
“Benton’s views are why for years he has pushed legislation that would protect the state’s historical monuments from being marred or moved. This year he is stepping up his efforts with two newly introduced measures, one of which seeks to amend the state constitution to permanently protect the carving of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Gens. Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson at Stone Mountain.”
“House Resolution 1179, which Benton, R-Jefferson, dropped in the House “hopper” Wednesday [January 27th], assures that the “heroes of the Confederate States of America … shall never [be] altered, removed, concealed or obscured in any fashion and shall be preserved and protected for all time as a tribute to the bravery and heroism of the citizens of this state who suffered and died in their cause.”
“Benton also is behind a second bill, House Bill 855, requiring the state to formally recognize Lee’s birthday on Jan. 19 and Confederate Memorial Day on April 26. State employees have long received these as paid vacation days, but this year Gov. Nathan Deal had them listed on state calendars as generic holidays.”
And finally:
“Benton has another bill, House Bill 854, which would require streets named in honor of [Confederate] veterans that have been renamed since 1968 revert back to their original names. That bill has no cosponsors and — for both political and practical reasons — is unlikely to get a hearing, but were it to pass it would result in a portion of Martin Luther King Boulevard reverting back to its original name, Gordon Road.”
“Gordon Road was named in honor of Gen. John B. Gordon, a highly decorated Confederate officer who later was governor and a U.S. senator from Georgia and was an early leader of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia. A statue of Gordon, in Confederate uniform and astride his horse, occupies a prominent place on the Capitol grounds.”
Well I’ll say.
New Orleans is the latest city that has voted to remove several of its Confederate monuments. There have been rumors of calls for destruction of the monuments once they are removed, however New Orleans has not stated that it is in favor of that approach. More than likely places like “The Crescent City” will heed calls for relocating said monuments in other areas of the city or in museums.
Calls to remove Confederate monuments from government display have received renewed vigor since last year’s massacre of nine African Americans in Charleston, South Carolina’s Emanuel AME Church. The shooter, avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof, took several pictures of himself with the Confederate flag; and he was spotted and apprehended after the shooting due to the Confederate States of America license plate on his vehicle.
But don’t tell “Massa Benton” that:
In an interview last summer with the AJC, Benton said he saw the concern over the flag as a distraction from problems within the black community.
“That flag didn’t’ shoot anybody and when I was growing up I had a couple of those flags.
In fact I still have a couple of them. It doesn’t make me a racist,” he said. “Nobody said anything about black-on-black crime, and that’s about 98 percent of it. Nobody said anything about family life and who’s in the home and who’s not in the home. It’s always something else that is the problem.”
Where oh where do I begin? Give me the strength Lord … just give me the strength …
Sigh.
What Benton and other despicable liars like him always go to in their White Supremacist Playbook (WSP) is the “black-on-black crime-fake-right.” Its not that Benton and those of his ilk don’t know about the myth of black-on-black crime, or that the main cry against police violence is that cops are shielded from accountability and justice and are allowed to murder and brutalize civilians with an impunity that does not exist for civilians when they commit similar crimes; the problem is that they don’t care. Truth and facts do not matter when white supremacy’s way of life, sense of entitlement and right to comfort are challenged.
When “Massa Benton” says the Confederate flag didn’t shoot anybody, he is correct. Those who uphold it shot people, and lynched people, and burned people, and raped people, and mutilated people, and a bunch of other things. And they, like police, were shielded from accountability by law and policy. By legislators just like him; ones who came before him and stand with him now, and those who are being groomed right now to take his place when he leaves.
Neo-Confederates like Benton argue that the Civil War was not fought over slavery. Verbal gymnastics aside, the South’s way of life … which was built on slavery … was at risk of being destroyed. So yeah, they took up arms. They committed treason. They lost. But they consider those folks who engaged in all of that illegality to be heroes deserving of places of respect and honor not in a museum or private residence, but in full view of the public, paid for and maintained by public tax dollars. It’s as if once you cross over a state line, you have no doubt whatsoever that you have entered into a country other than the United States.
The iconic carving of Jefferson Davis, Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson on Stone Mountain is the Confederacy’s answer to Mount Rushmore. Benton’s knee-jerk proposed legislation to keep the mountain as-is is part of the white racist backlash in the wake of Emanuel AME. It is doubtful that anything on such a grand scale as removing a carving from the side of mountain would ever happen, but again, that’s not the point. The point that Benton is making is the same as Dylann Roof when he put the Confederate States of America license plate on his car: white supremacy and its defense are a just and noble cause against the scourge of The Blacks. This is what he mean when he says,
Following the Civil War, the Klan “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order” … “It made a lot of people straighten up” …“I’m not saying what they did was right. It’s just the way things were.”
Whose law and whose order? Naked white supremacy’s, that’s who. Chattle enslavement and the codes and mores that went with it, the South’s “way of life,” were what kept enslaved Africans in line with “law and order.” After the check of slavery ended something new was needed. Part of what was needed was found in the Ku Klux Klan.
Don’t expect “Massa Benton” in his other job as a state legislator to give up his fight to honor the “Founding Fathers” of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan anytime soon. But he and the ilk/constituents he represents need to know that 1865 came and went and today is a new day. There actually are people out here who absolutely refuse to pretend that the Confederacy and its monuments are some benign historical figures that must be saved from censorship. We see them for what they are: odes to a barbarous white supremacy that has not completely been swept from the earth yet. And no midnight visits from men in white sheets—or daytime visits from men in business suits—will scare us from that truth.
FOHWTBS.