On July 23rd, North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory (R) signed into law Senate Bill 22, the
Cultural History Artifact Management and Patriotism Act of 2015, barring the removal of "objects of remembrance" from public property, defining such objects as:
a monument, memorial, plaque, statue, marker, or display of a permanent character that commemorates an event, a person, or military service that is part of North Carolina's history.
That is to say, a Confederate memorial.
Yesterday, in the charming and history-steeped community of Hillsborough, NC (pop. 6,000), home to substantial progressive and LGBT communities, the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP and its president, Rev. Dr. William J. Barber, staged a rally of some 400 attendees to protest this law, as well as to proactively address a 'Southern Heritage' rally to be held on the same spot this Saturday by battle flag-waving members of a small group calling itself Orange County Taking Back Orange County.
Every single speaker at the NAACP event had something powerful and remarkable to say.
Laurel Ashton, a white field organizer for the NC-NAACP, gave a remarkable testimony from the heart, reminding the audience:
Let me tell you what the real tragedy is. The tragedy is that these very people, those who will drive through the Piedmont waving Confederate flags, converging here in this courtyard, these very people, many of whom are poor and face a system of economic oppression daily, are hurting and sometimes even dying because of the policies passed by our elected officials. It is these poor white southerners who are so often without healthcare, who are underpaid and need a raise in the minimum wage, who have children struggling in under-resourced public schools, who live alongside black folks in rural communities where they can’t drink the water because of lack of environmental protections. It is these poor white folks who need access to affordable women’s healthcare, who need an end to the death penalty, who need emergency unemployment and earned income tax credits.
But, instead, they get a flag and a monument. And they have been fooled into believing that is enough.
The lie of ‘Southern Heritage’ is more than just a lie; it is a tool, a very dangerous tool of division. Those white folks will see the legislators who passed this bill, who refuse to act on Confederate license plates, and who use racialized rhetoric to gain support, as their champions. The very people who are hurting them, their children, their schools, and their environment. The very people who have chosen to protect symbols of white supremacy over the people of North Carolina...over the very people who will gather here in two days. They will stand here to defend a lie, a lie of Southern heritage, rather than standing here with us today, rather than recognizing our shared humanity, our shared history, and our shared best interests. Rather than moving forward together, not one step back.
Historian Timothy Tyson spoke to the myth of Confederate monuments and flags as symbols of 'Southern heritage':
If somebody had tried to put Confederate monuments all over North Carolina shortly after the Civil War, there would have been another war. The unanimous white South is nothing but a cherished myth. White North Carolinians erected nearly all of the Confederate monuments after 1898, half a century or more after the Civil War ended. More importantly, white North Carolinians built the monuments after the white supremacy campaigns had seized the government of North Carolina and had taken the vote away from African Americans. The monuments reflected as much of white ascendancy as they did the legacy of the Confederacy. For example, if you look at the Confederate monument at UNC Chapel Hill, better known as Silent Sam - at its dedication in 1913, Julian S. Carr, an industrialist, bragged in his speech that he had "horsewhipped a Negro wench until her skirts hung in shreds because she had publicly insulted a Southern lady." He heralded “the Anglo-Saxon race in the South, reunited with itself, with white supremacy as the glue.”
During the actual Civil War, the actual Confederacy was bitterly divided between white North Carolinians. This was the last Southern state to secede. Alamance County, the only time that it was permitted to vote on secession, voted 1,114 to 254 against secession. There remained a persistent outcry of moral dissent. Thousands of whites even took up arms against the Confederacy, and far more refused to accept its authority. Thousands of black North Carolinians escaped slavery and served in the Union Army. Confederate officials complained that eastern North Carolina was "infested with disloyal persons," and western North Carolina was heavily Unionist. Confederate Governor Zebulon Vance called the Civil War, when he was campaigning in 1864, "a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight," and he threatened to take North Carolina out of the Confederacy. The 1862 Confederate Conscription Act, which exempted prosperous slave owners from serving in the Confederate military, turned many more people against the war: North Carolina’s own internal civil war began in earnest, from the coastal swamps to the Blue Ridge, anti-Confederate guerrillas, Unionists, and runaway slaves battled the Confederacy. Parts of North Carolina became virtually ungovernable. Alamance and Hillsborough were hotbeds of resistance to the Confederacy, and home to hundreds of the so-called Red Strings, which was an anti-Confederate guerrilla group. There were thousands and thousands of them in this state, and hundreds and hundreds of them in this community.
Campaigning in 1864, Governor Vance also declared, "the great popular heart is not now, and never has been, in this war. It was a revolution of the politicians, and not the people."
The notion that the Confederacy somehow represents North Carolina’s heritage is not historical, but political.
Turning from the illusory past to an all too plausible future, Rev. Barber said:
Governor, legislators who support this stuff: whatever happens - and I pray nothing will - but it will be on your record. And it concerns me when I think about my staff and team, not so much myself. Because let me just read to you some messages we’ve gotten since they passed this bill.
"Blacks should not hold so much hate about their past as slaves. They should rather embrace their past. If it had not went the way it did you’d still be in Africa, dying of hunger, AIDS, and ebola. Think about it."
This was sent to the NAACP’s office.
"Slavery was your ticket to the best country in the world, yet you bitch and whine and complain, Barber. Enough is never enough. I don’t think blacks really hate items from the past. Rather I think you people just hate yourselves."
Governor, this is what you are unleashing.
Indeed. For, meanwhile, back at the
Orange County Taking Back Orange County Facebook page, Southern heritage supporters excited by the prospect of their upcoming spasm of battle flag-waving in Hillsborough this Saturday were posting comments like these:
Steeped in a rich history, Hillsborough has no shortage of admirable sons, daughters, events and sites to proudly raise monuments to, including the Occaneechi Trail, the Regulators and the Red Strings, Daniel Boone and Billy Strayhorn. Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston's army camped here, facing Union General William T. Sherman's at Raleigh, and laid down their arms as the two generals met near Durham to sign the surrender which brought an end to the War Between the States, thus sparing North Carolina from pointless destruction.
