During my childhood in Dallas, the Civil War was less than a century in the past. It seemed that a lot of people did not want to let go—as if that were such a wonderful and glorious time. The Confederate States of America’s stars and bars could be seen frequently, and there were Rebel hotels, Rebel drive-ins, Rebel taxi companies, Rebel carpet cleaners and so on. John B. Hood Junior High School, Thomas Jefferson High School and Arlington State University unapologetically used the Rebel as the mascot for their sports teams, as did many others.
My maternal grandmother and several other women in our family had been proud members of the Daughters of the Confederacy, the group that did so much to romanticize the “lost cause” in which the South finally capitulated in the war. One of my male ancestors had been with Robert E. Lee when he surrendered at Appomattox in 1865, for what that is worth.
I had to grow up, go to college, read voluminously and have discussions with people smarter than I before I could formulate a coherent view toward the CSA. Although I am in many ways a middle-of-the-road person, this was one issue on which that would not suffice. And I knew the direction to which I leaned: the Confederacy deserved to be abnegated, repudiated and forsworn. How many thousands of books have been written that strive to praise and legitimize the Confederacy? Probably a hundred of those are biographies of Lee, a man of spotless character who, nonetheless, fought for a government (if the CSA may be so called) based on something awful and repulsive. I refer to slavery, of course.
The first batch of African slaves arrived in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619, and those wretched individuals were quickly put to work. Human beings, no different from me, and they were treated in a most inhumane way. This is neither the time nor place to detail the terrible things they endured for more than 10 generations. But one thing is for sure—they had to be liberated, whether by their own hand (it happened in Haiti, you know) or by the Civil War. The CSA’s constitution made no attempt to hide the fact that it was based on the principle of racial subjugation, that European Americans had the responsibility and right to dominate black people.
As history shows, the South lost the war but eventually overturned Reconstruction as the Yankee troops went home in 1877. The grand experiment of having black men in legislatures in South Carolina, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas and other Southern states was soon dismissed as the Jim Crow era began. The former slaves—or most of them, I should say, because there were some strong and defiant people—were forced to cower amid a constant threat of violence. Lynchings, rapes, beatings and race riots took place with depressing regularity. When the Ku Klux Klan got together, those boys invariably waved the Rebel flag. It was fraught with emotional symbolism.
In 1980, I was living in Denton. The grounds of the county courthouse had a tall statue in honor of the Confederate dead. I sometimes stood there looking at it, pondering what it had meant to the people who erected it 90 years earlier. I thought also about the feelings of the black citizens who passed by. In a letter to the local newspaper, the Denton Record-Chronicle, I stated that, as a European American with Confederate roots, it was appropriate that I urge the statue’s removal. I knew it was not going to happen, but I wanted to make my views known. The letter was printed, and it got a couple of negative responses.
When I moved back to Austin, I sometimes ran in the Camp Ben McCulloch 5K race. McCulloch was a brigadier general in the Civil War for whom the Sons of the Confederacy named their gathering ground southwest of Austin in 1896. The organizer of the race, a friend named Darrell, was part and parcel of “Camp Ben.” He had spent many pleasant summers there. I liked Darrell, who went out of his way to emphasize that it was about family, history and heritage—not racism. By that time, however, fond reminiscences of the Confederacy were justifiably rare. The T-shirt given to every runner featured a small but unmistakable Rebel flag. I never wore it, not once. I could not do so, in deference to the feelings of the many black people I have known, respected and loved over the years.
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