Tag: confederate states of america
Endorse This: ‘I Have Heard Enough About Heritage!’

Endorse This: ‘I Have Heard Enough About Heritage!’

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On the South Carolina House floor, debate raged long into the night over a series of amendments introduced to thwart and delay passage of a bill to bring the Confederate flag off the State House grounds. An impassioned plea to pass the bill — unchanged — came from an unlikely corner: Jenny Horne, a Republican House member and descendant of Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis.

With tears in her eyes, screaming at times, Horne implored her fellow state lawmakers to pass the bill without delay. “I cannot believe that we do not have the heart in this body to do something meaningful such as take a symbol of hate off these grounds on Friday. And if any of you vote to amend, you are ensuring that this flag will fly beyond Friday!”

Watch Horne’s speech in full — an extraordinary appeal for progress, reconciliation, and Southern pride at its best.

“I have heard enough about heritage!” she said. “I have a heritage. I am a lifelong South Carolinian. I am a descendant of Jefferson Davis. Okay? But that does not matter. It’s not about Jenny Horne. It’s about the people of South Carolina who have demanded that this symbol of hate come off of the State House grounds!”

Video viaC-SPAN.

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Happy Jefferson Davis Day!

Happy Jefferson Davis Day!

If you happen to be in Alabama today, crack open a cold one for Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, whose legacy of leading the short-lived nation devoted to keeping people in bondage is still celebrated in the Heart of Dixie on the first Monday of every June.

In fact, according to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, several Southern states officially celebrate the Confederacy in some way.

Mississippi celebrates Confederate Memorial Day on the last Monday of April, Alabama on the fourth Monday of April, and Georgia on April 26. North and South Carolina observe it on May 10, Louisiana on June 3 and Tennessee calls that date Confederate Decoration Day. Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day January 19 and Virginia calls the last Monday in May Confederate Memorial Day.

This isn’t entirely surprising given the long, pernicious practice of the South whitewashing its own legacy, reframing the Confederate rebellion as a matter of state sovereignty, and not, you know, enslavement of human beings.

Davis’ veep, Alexander Stephens, was pretty unequivocal on that point, saying that the new nation was “founded […] upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition.” 

Or as Gawker‘s Adam Weinstein puts it:

It’s a peculiar holiday, given that […] Jefferson Davis was the head of a f*cking racist tyrannical state whose f*cking reason for f*cking existing was its f*cking insistence on the treatment of enslaved human beings as f*cking chattel to enrich f*cking people like Jefferson Davis.

Cheers, Alabama.

Photo: J. Stephen Conn via Flickr

ViaGawker