Tag: columbia
5 Monuments To The Confederacy That Have Been Vandalized

5 Monuments To The Confederacy That Have Been Vandalized

In the latest backlash against Confederate monuments, the statue commonly known as “Silent Sam” at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was found vandalized on Sunday — with statements spray-painted all around it, saying: “Black Lives Matter,” “KKK,” and “Murderer.”

The student newspaper at UNC-Chapel Hill, The Daily Tar Heel, tells the story of the monument:

In 1913 Silent Sam was constructed as a monument to the more than 300 UNC students who died in the Civil War. The sculptor, John Wilson, made the soldier “silent” by leaving out the cartridge box on the the soldier’s belt, meaning he could not fire his gun. The monument was paid for by the Daughters of the Confederacy.

Julian Carr, the namesake of Carrboro [a city in North Carolina], spoke at the monument’s dedication. In his speech he recalled the time he whipped a black woman for insulting a white woman.

“The extensive discussions with the Carolina community this past year by the Board of Trustees and University leadership and the work we will be doing to contextualize the history of our campus is a big part of advancing those conversations,” a university spokesman said in a statement, the Tar Heel reports. “We welcome all points of view, but damaging or defacing statues is not the way to go about it.”

The base of the statue, now defaced, has been covered up with a white tarp and duct tape.

Another notable aspect of Silent Sam, and the mythical imagery that surrounds many Confederate memorials, is that this statue faces northward — as if the Southern hero is preparing to meet the oncoming Yankees.

There is, however, one little historical problem with this bit of imagery: North Carolina was taken by the U.S. Army from the southern direction, as General Sherman and his men made their way up from Georgia and then into the Carolinas.

James Loewen, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Vermont, and author of multiple history books, including Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, and Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong, offers an interesting perspective on the rash of vandalism against monuments that were erected both to promote white supremacy and to distort history.

“I’m in favor of the vandalism,” Loewen, whose work has focused a great deal on educating the public on racism and social progress (and setbacks) throughout American history, told The National Memo. “I think it shows progress when Jefferson Davis gets vandalized at the University of Texas. A few years ago, Martin Luther King at the University of Texas got vandalized so often that they had to post a 24-hour guard, and then installed TV cameras. Maybe we are moving toward a better day in race relations.”

The vandalism of the Martin Luther King statue at the University of Texas, which Loewen refers to, occurred repeatedly in the mid-2000s.

While favoring the defacing of Confederate monuments in the immediate term, Loewen also had his own suggestion for what to do with them. “Historians are always advocating that we should ‘contextualize’ monuments,” Loewen explained. “Silent Sam deserves to have a historical marker in front of him, summarizing what Julian Carr said at his dedication. That would provide important context for the meaning of Silent Sam in his time — and perhaps in ours.”

In Carr’s dedication speech, the industrialist benefactor recounted the “duty” of the Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, in the reassertion of white supremacy against the empowerment of the liberated black people — and shared his own personal anecdote of how the university had provided him shelter in this task when he returned home from Robert E. Lee’s army:

The present generation, I am persuaded, scarcely takes note of what the Confederate soldier meant to the welfare of the Anglo Saxon race during the four years immediately succeeding the war, when the facts are that their courage and steadfastness saved the very life of the Anglo Saxon race in the South — when the “bottom rail was on top” all over the Southern states, and to-day, as a consequence, the purest strain of the Anglo Saxon is to be found in the 13 Southern States — Praise God.

I trust I may be pardoned for one allusion, howbeit it is rather personal. One hundred yards from where we stand, less than ninety days perhaps after my return from Appomattox, I horse-whipped a negro wench, until her skirts hung in shreds, because upon the streets of this quiet village she had publicly insulted and maligned a Southern lady, and then rushed for protection to these University buildings where was stationed 100 Federal soldiers. I performed the pleasing duty in the immediate presence of the entire garrison, and for thirty nights afterwards slept with double-barreled shotgun under my head.

Silent Sam is not the only statue of a Confederate or white-supremacist luminary to fall victim to these latest rounds of vandalism.

Next: Confederate Defenders of Charleston In the days after the mass murder at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, the city’s “Confederate Defenders” monument, fashioned in the style of Greco-Roman heroic nudity in honor of the men who first attacked Fort Sumter, became the first Confederate memorial to be spray-painted with messages for African-American civil rights. This statue was erected in 1932, by the Charleston Chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Next: John C. Calhoun

Shortly after the Confederate Defenders of Charleston, the city’s statue of John C. Calhoun was also defaced.

Calhoun, a vice president of the United States and then a U.S. senator until his death in 1850, could very well be considered to have been the spiritual godfather of the Confederacy, having long argued for the South’s right to secede if slavery were to be threatened. He is also most famous for his 1837 speech on the Senate floor, “Slavery a Positive Good,” in which he asserted slavery to be the valued foundation of civilization itself.

Next: Jefferson Davis At about the same time, the statue of Confederate States of America president Jefferson Davis at the University of Texas was also defaced.

Next: “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman

And back in South Carolina, at the state Capitol building in Columbia, a statue of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman had a balloon of red paint thrown at it. Tillman was one of the leaders in the violent overthrow of Reconstruction, and the inauguration of the Jim Crow regime.

The State newspaper described Tillman:

Tillman, a former governor and U.S. senator whose political career spanned 1890 to 1918, promoted white supremacy, including lynching and denial of voting rights to blacks and women. He also was a participant in the massacre of black militia members during Reconstruction.

Photo: Ishmael Bishop via Facebook

A Flag Hijacked By Modern Segregationists

A Flag Hijacked By Modern Segregationists

This originally appeared inThe Washington Spectator.

A historian and Southerner says the Confederate flag was not the flag of the Confederacy.

I am a Southerner by both birth and heritage. I come from a long line of poor white cotton farmers on both sides of my family. Three of my four great-grandfathers fought in the Confederate Army. The fourth had been told by his parents that he could join the army when he turned 13; he was on his way from Texas to Virginia to do so when he met his brothers coming home on the road. They told him that Lee had surrendered and the war was over. My grandmother was a member of the United Daughters of the Confederacy and I was enrolled at the age of 6 in the Children of the Confederacy. I mention these credentials because of what I am about to say about the Confederate battle flag.

The flag that is causing such a furor was not “the Confederate flag,” as so many news reports have described it. It was a military flag, originally square in form, designed by William Porcher Miles, an aide to General P.G.T. Beauregard, after the first Battle of Manassas, because Beauregard thought that the Confederate national flag, which had a circle of white stars in a blue canton and three broad stripes, red, white, and red, was too easily confused with the Union flag in the smoke of battle. Miles’ battle flag was never approved by the Confederate Congress and never adopted as a national flag. It never flew over Confederate government offices, or over the Capitol at Richmond.

It was not even prominent among the symbols of the Lost Cause that helped create the myth of the noble suffering South during the years after the Civil War, nor was it celebrated during those years as a hallowed symbol of the Southern past, as apologists for it claim. According to University of Mississippi historian Allen Cabaniss, writing in The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture, it was seldom displayed at Confederate reunions or used by any of the societies of descendants of Confederate veterans. My grandmother’s United Daughters of the Confederacy chapter used the first national flag, the one that Beauregard thought could be confused with the Union flag, at their meetings, and she made me a small one out of silk to hang in my bedroom.

Cabaniss describes how the Confederate battle flag emerged “out of limbo” as a symbol of white supremacy and segregation during the Dixiecrat political campaign of 1948, when Strom Thurmond of South Carolina ran for president on a platform of states’ rights and segregation. Newspaper accounts of the States’ Rights Democratic Party convention in Birmingham, Alabama, describe delegates marching into the auditorium under Confederate battle flags as bands played “Dixie.” This set the stage for the adoption of the battle flag by the Ku Klux Klan and the White Citizens Councils across the South as a symbol of their racist opposition to integration. The first time I can remember seeing a picture of the battle flag carried in public was during the Clinton, Tennessee, race riot in 1956, when hooded Klansmen descended on the town and paraded down the main street under the flag.

Next month the Klan will rally at the South Carolina statehouse grounds under the Confederate battle flag. When it was at its peak, in the 1920s, the Klan’s members paraded under the American flag.

The fact is that in the 1950s and 1960s, the Confederate battle flag was hijacked and dishonored by racists and white supremacists who were opposed to the federal government’s implementation of the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision ending public school segregation. Two years after the decision, in 1956, the Georgia Legislature incorporated the battle flag into the state flag as a protest against integration. The battle flag was first raised over the South Carolina state Capitol on April 11, 1961, to mark the beginning of the Civil War Centennial; in March 1962 the Legislature voted to leave it there as a protest against the civil rights movement. Its 20th century symbolism is clear to anyone who examines the historical record, and it is not something to honor or revere.

In June 1865, two months after the Confederate surrender, a Catholic priest named Abram Joseph Ryan, a former Confederate Army chaplain, published a poem entitled “The Conquered Banner.” Its seven stanzas urged Southerners to accept defeat and furl their flags. The final stanza reads:

Furl that banner, softly, slowly!
Treat it gently – it is holy –
For it droops above the dead.
Touch it not – unfold it never,
Let it droop there, furled forever,
For its people’s hopes are dead.

The poem was once a standard recitation piece in Southern households, including my grandmother’s. The racists of the 1950s should have heeded Father Ryan’s advice. Now it is definitely time to furl that banner.

Lonn Taylor is a historian and retired museum curator who lives in Fort Davis, Texas. He was a historian at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History from 1984 to 2002 and is the author of The Star-Spangled Banner: The Flag That Inspired the National Anthem, among other publications.

This originally appeared inThe Washington Spectator.

Photo: Shannon Hauser via Flickr

KKK Cavalry Will Go To SC To Support The Confederate Flag

KKK Cavalry Will Go To SC To Support The Confederate Flag

South Carolina media are now abuzz over the latest provocation in the (somehow still ongoing) debate over the Confederate flag: The Klan is coming to town.

A group called “The Loyal White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan” will be holding a demonstration at the State House to show support for the Confederate flag on July 18, Columbia newspaper The State reports. The group says that it expects between 100 and 200 people.

The Loyal White Knights are actually based in North Carolina, spurring Governor Nikki Haley (R) to say, “This is our state, and they are not welcome.”

However, the group’s “Great Titan,” James Spears, told the local NBC affiliate that the group has local membership in Columbia to call its own.

“Our Grand Dragon lives 20 minutes from the State House, where the flag’s at,” Spears said. “That’s where we’ll be holding a cross lighting at the end of the night.”

Spears also promised a peaceful rally: “We usually have pretty peaceful rallies. I mean, to me, it should be a peaceful rally. Like I said, it’s for the Confederate Flag.”

Well, that’s reassuring.

Also, as the report shows, even the Sons of Confederate Veterans organization is saying that these guys are bad news.

 

Meanwhile, fights already broke out at the State House on Monday, when pro-Confederate flag demonstrators clashed with flag opponents. A white man, Nicholas Thompson, was arrested for fighting outside the State House, apparently after getting out of his pickup truck during a pro-flag procession Here’s video of the fracas, from the local NBC affiliate:

“The blood on my face, the blood in my teeth, the blood on my hands is no comparison to the Southern blood that runs through my veins,” said Joe Linder, another young white male involved in the fighting, in an interview with the local CBS affiliate. “I am proud of my heritage, I am not ashamed, and more than all, racism has no part in that flag.”

In addition, the vandalism of Confederate emblems has now also extended to iconic figures of the post-Reconstruction period — men who are sometimes referred to by the somewhat ironic title of “Redeemers” — with red paint having been splashed on a statue of “Pitchfork Ben” Tillman, the former South Carolina governor who, The State explains, “promoted white supremacy, including lynching and denial of voting rights to blacks and women” and was “also was a participant in the massacre of black militia members during Reconstruction.”

Screenshot: WISTV

Four More Votes Needed To Remove Confederate Flag From SC Capitol

Four More Votes Needed To Remove Confederate Flag From SC Capitol

As Rev. Clementa Pinckney, one of nine victims of a racially motivated mass shooting last week, was laid to rest on Friday in Charleston, South Carolina, the Confederate battle flag — the symbol worn by shooter Dylann Storm Roof — continued to fly outside the South Carolina Capitol building in Columbia.

A growing number of Southern politicians and U.S. businesses have called for the flag’s removal following the killing of nine black parishioners of Emanuel AME Church on June 17 by Roof, a 21-year-old white man.

This week, South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, joined the chorus of conservative officials changing their tune. “It’s time to move the flag from the Capitol grounds,” she said at a news conference. But the decision is ultimately not Haley’s.

Any measure to remove the flag from the South Carolina State House’s grounds requires a two-thirds supermajority in the state legislature, under the 2000 South Carolina Heritage Act.

Four more members of the South Carolina House of Representatives must commit to vote in favor of removing the flag in order for the state legislature to mandate its removal, according to polling data by The Post and Courier.

In the state Senate, 33 of 45 members (73 percent) have told The Post and Courier that they agree the flag should be taken down. Currently, 78 of 123 (63 percent) House representatives in South Carolina have said the flag should come down, just four representatives shy of the two-thirds majority needed for a bill to pass.

In both houses, every lawmaker who told The Post they were either undecided or would vote against removing the flag, as well as anyone who refused or neglected to answer the question, were Republicans.

State senators have introduced a bill to move the flag from its current location near the Confederate Soldier Monument outside the State House to the Confederate Relic Room at the State Museum. House representatives also introduced two bills that call for the flag to be removed. Discussion of the bills and a final vote are expected in coming weeks.

Photo: A sign urging South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley to take down the Confederate flag is part of the sidewalk memorial at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church on June 20, 2015, in Charleston, S.C. (Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/TNS)