Prof. James Loewen writes today about
how history has been turned upside down "with the pen (and noose)" by Southern apologists, then and now, and how its chickens have come home to roost:
With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating
what the Confederacy was about and our Army honoring Southern generals,
no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently. We
can see the impact of Confederate symbols and thinking on Dylann Roof,
accused of killing nine in a Charleston, S.C., church, but other
examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred
P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a
neo-Confederate T-shirt
showing Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic semper tyrannis.” When white
students in Appleton, Wis. — a recovering “sundown town” that for
decades had been all white on purpose — had issues with Mexican American
students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags, which they already had at home, at the ready.
Across
the country, removing slavery from its central role in prompting the
Civil War marginalizes African Americans and makes us all
stupid. De-Confederatizing the United States won’t end white supremacy,
but it will be a momentous step in that direction.
As long as we fear telling the sometimes ugly truth about our history, there will remain a large, ignorant population in this country that, 150 years on, will use the false myths of the Confederacy to justify flaunting its symbols of bigotry and treason. It's long, long past time Americans stop indulging those noxious lies.
