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I realized evidence didn’t matter; he had chosen his own facts based on his culture.
The linguist Geoffrey Nunberg said that the English language “has a rich vocabulary for describing statements that fall short of the truth,” including untruth, bogus, baseless, groundless, falsehood, debunked, unverified, and dishonest. Nunberg argued that a “certain moral opprobrium attaches to [lie], a reprehensibility of motive.”
To a boy growing up in Virginia, Lee was more than the greatest general of the Civil War, more than the greatest Virginian; Lee was the greatest human who ever lived.
more people used the Confederate Battle Flag between World War II and the early 1970s than ever fought under it from 1861 to 1865.
Commanding the force that crushed Brown’s 1859 raid was Lieutenant Colonel Robert E. Lee.
President John F. Kennedy refused to attend a ceremony celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It was too controversial for white southerners.
The United States fought against a rebel force that would not accept the results of a democratic election and chose armed rebellion.
When I hear “the War of Northern Aggression” or “the War Between the States,” I know a Confederate sympathizer or argument against equal rights will soon follow.
Created in the 1980s, Splash Mountain, a log flume ride, has its origins in the racist Song of the South movie.
A hundred and eighty thousand African Americans, most recently emancipated, fought for their own freedom as U.S. Army soldiers. The number of enslaved fighting as Confederate soldiers is a nice round number—zero.
Perhaps we should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms.
All knew that Alexandria was just across the river and could easily absorb any slave trading from the city of Washington. In fact, Alexandria profited handsomely from the outlawing of slavery in the District, becoming a major enslaved warehouse during the 1850s.
The Battle of Alexandria was over, and the city would stay under U.S. control for the rest of the war. The Confederates in my hometown gave up without a fight—almost.
Before Ellsworth’s murder, northern public opinion looked at the secessionists more like wayward brothers enticed by radicals.
That’s the Virginia I knew. I shouldn’t feel surprised, but I always do. I’ve found so many plaques, monuments, and memorials that support white supremacy.
Alexandria doubled down on memorializing Confederates. The city passed a law in 1953 requiring all new street names that ran north and south to honor Confederates.46
According to my textbook, the white gentleman just purchased the African family, and they eagerly await bondage not only for the rest of their lives but for their children’s and grandchildren’s lives—perpetual enslavement.
The only way to argue for slavery, then or now, is to believe that the enslaved weren’t real human beings.
That’s why they saw integration as such a threat. The courts would give everyone the ballot, and the white supremacists’ hold on elected office would weaken.
Thousands of schoolchildren went without education for half a decade so Virginia could, once again, maintain its racial code.
The Washington Post called Alexandria in 1957 “Northern Virginia’s last stronghold of conservatism” when conservatism meant racism.
if I call a plantation an enslaved labor farm, then I should also call segregated Virginia by its true name—a racial police state. To be clear, the South of my birth was no democracy.
During my first year there, I didn’t talk to a Black person. It was only decades later that I realized Monroe was nearly 50 percent African American.
Starting in the fourth grade, I played peewee football. Football and only football. No soccer for me. My dad and his entire generation made fun of soccer; it was a game for Europeans or, even worse, Yankees. Both groups were equally foreign.
southerners continue to focus on a four-year period when they fought a rebellion to create a slave republic and lost badly.
In the Black newspaper the Atlanta Daily World and in The Crisis, I finally found other, more accurate voices
Black women had little control over their own bodies, and white men used their economic and social power for sexual exploitation.
Georgia was a racial police state, not a democracy.
The late Tony Horwitz, the author of the brilliant book Confederates in the Attic, called Lexington “the second city of Confederate remembrance: Medina to Richmond’s Mecca.”
At Washington and Lee, we had a god much more tangible, and one worshipped far more openly than Jesus. Robert E. Lee was God, and his Confederate cause was the one true religion.
Yet one of the U.S. Army’s most prestigious posts remains named after a fairly low-ranking Confederate commander, one who spent a lifetime trying to destroy the United States.
At our most racially diverse post, the army honors a man who wore army blue for three decades and then refused to stay when his nation needed him most.
As Ulysses S. Grant would later write, Floyd “distributed the cannon and small arms from the Northern arsenals throughout the South so as to be on hand when treason wanted them.”
The War Department realized it made a mistake appointing the ardent secessionist to a school filled with impressionable young men thinking about treason.
During the Great War, the U.S. Army would increase in size from just over one hundred thousand to four million soldiers in twenty months,
In the early twentieth century, the Southern Cross of Honor represented the secular religion of the Lost Cause for white southerners.
we must recognize that reconciliation came at a steep and horrifying cost. African Americans paid the price with lynching, Jim Crow segregation, and the loss of the franchise. The price for white reconciliation remains far too high.
While many people complain about the posts named for Confederates, I find the name Fort Belvoir, renamed after an eighteenth-century enslaved labor farm in the 1930s, even worse.
Even today, there is no single document that lists the total number of camps and sub-camps all over the country.77
soldiers under Forrest’s command, and likely under his orders, massacred Black U.S. soldiers and Black women. In discussing the massacre, a soldier wrote a week after the battle that several Confederate troops “tried to stop the butchery” of the U.S. soldiers but that Forrest “ordered them shot down like dogs, and the bloodbath continued.”
The South had lost the war but won the narrative.
The border states that remained in the United States like Missouri, Maryland, Kentucky, and even West Virginia have Confederate streamers, even though they had more soldiers fight for the U.S. than the C.S.A.
I saw a video with an African American soldier wearing a tab honoring a Confederate regiment that fought to keep his ancestors in perpetual bondage.
After two years of graduate school at the Ohio State University,
was surprised to find no Lee memorabilia in the Ohio flea markets. Everything commemorated Lincoln and Grant.
We aren’t a militaristic people who celebrate holidays with tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue like the Russians or Chinese, but we are a warlike people. No one goes to war more often than we do.
At West Point, southern cadets became infuriated when some northerners publicly stated that Brown was a martyr.
it took more courage to vote for Lincoln at West Point in 1860 than it did to face Pickett’s Charge in 1863.5
Only 23 of the 155 officers assigned as faculty between 1833 and 1861 and no senior officers at West Point in 1861 left; even those from the South stayed.
West Point allowed the return of Robert E. Lee when African American cadets arrived at West Point in the twentieth century.
