The symbols of the Confederacy have come under fire in the wake of the recent massacre of nine Black people in Charleston, S.C. by self-avowed white supremacist, Dylann Roof.
Grasping the horror of the murders and the white supremacist symbolism embraced by Roof that included the Confederate battle flag; some states and companies are shifting their stance on the Confederate battle flag and other Confederacy pharaphinalia. Companies like Wal-Mart, Amazon, E-Bay and Sears will no longer carry these items.
The Governor of Alabama quickley ordered the battle flag removed from the Capitol grounds. The South Carolina Senate has voted for removal, the Governor promises to sign the bill if it passes the House. And in Little Rock, an effort by Dr. Anika Whitfield has been initiated to remove the name of Confederate Blvd. The new name proposed is Springer, named for an African-American family with a long history in the area. The name change will require a vote of the City Directors.
City Director Kathy Webb, who is white, came out in support of this name change stating, "Having something like a street or the flag, it's a symbol of slavery and it's a symbol of oppression and I don't think it's something we need to have."
After making her support known, Director Webb has received a significant amount of pushback. Some have gone so far as to threaten to not vote for future political endeavors if she continues to support the name change.
"Heritage not Hate" is the leading cry of resistance, along with claims of honoring the Confederate dead buried nearby in the National Cemetery. For the record, this cemetery also holds the graves of Union soldiers. Furthermore, there is a monument inside the cemetery erected in1884 that serves the purpose of honoring the Confederate dead buried there.
As the name of the street and its meaning is debated, we cannot forget that Dylann Roof targeted his victims because they were Black. It was his wish to start a race war. Photos of him have surfaced posing with the Confederate battle flag and a gun. He visited Confederate soldier's graves, other Confederate heritage sites and slavery museums. His written manifesto and actions clearly exhibit his connection to the cause of white supremacy through the lens of the Confederacy.
The KKK surfaced in Arkansas in 1868 formed by Confederate war veterans. Their purpose was to oppose and disrupt through any means necessary, usually with violence, the efforts of Reconstruction. In particular any policies that elevated the rights of the African-American population. Not only did they terrorize and attack Black people's bodies and properties, they also violently attacked white Republicans who advocated these policies.
So determined was the Klan to destroy any campaigns to rebuild the state to include the voice and will of Black people that they assassinated one of the leading proponents of these policies, sitting Arkansas U.S. Representative, James Hind. In that same ambush in Monroe County, they also severely wounded Arkansas State Representative Joseph Brooks.
Prior to the war, the South’s economy depended on slavery. Second only to agriculture, the internal slave trade was the largest economic enterprise in the South. At the beginning of the war there were 4 million slaves in the South with a value of 4 Billion dollars.
In the Southern secession statements they unabashedly proclaim slavery as the cause of their scession. (Samples follow at the end of this article)
Yes, it's true that the United States, in its entirety, is complicit and bears the weight of the holocaust committed against millions of Africans and their descendants. But it was the South who violently resisted the end of slavery, going so far as to leave the Union and starting a war to keep it, a war that killed 620,000 men. Over slavery.
The heritage of the Confederacy with its symbols and monuments; exalts a romanticized, Gone With the Wind version of a brutal, bloody history that is founded in the perpetuity of white supremacy. To claim that Dylann Roof was a lone, mentally unstable young man, is to whitewash the 150 years of violence post-Civil War that has been done to deprive Black people from an equal place in America.
The experiences of white people under the symbols of the Confederacy are for the majority vastly different than those of Black people. Here in the South we still have living historians in Black families who know the stories, or have witnessed, or experienced themselves, what was done to Blacks in the South under Jim Crow and segregation.
Arkansas claims the dubious ranking of fourth (503 lynchings) in the listing of 12 Southern states with racial terror lynchings from 1877-1950. These lynchings were to enforce Jim Crow laws and segregation.
In 1918, white citizens in Earle, Arkansas cut Elton Mitchell into pieces with butcher knives for refusing to work for free. His killers hung his butchered body parts from a tree.
In 1919 Black sharecroppers in Elaine, AR began organizing and meeting to gain fair payment for their crops. A skirmish between the meeting's armed guard's and three white men on the street led to the death of one of the white men and another being wounded. As a result 237 African-Americans were hunted down and murdered (lynched) by vigilantes, deputized citizenry and 600 white troops from the U.S. military. No white person was ever charged in the killings. However 122 African-Americans were charged with various crimes.
The first twelve men to go on trial were charged with murder and given the death sentence. Sixty-five others quickly entered pleas for second-degree murder and were sentenced to as much as 21 years. The rest were dismissed or were not prosecuted. It would take several years for the twelve men on death row to be free.
In 1948 the Dixiecrats, who used the Confederate battle flag as their banner, formed to oppose desegregation and Truman's efforts to establish anti-lynching laws. The opposition from Southern legislators including Arkansas' was so strong that the anti-lynching efforts were defeated.
Jim Crow laws themselves did not begin to lose their power until the 1950's as the quest for equitable education culminated in Brown v. the Board of Education. Although weakened, many aspects of Jim Crow continued legally until the Civil Rights Act was signed in1964.
Dylann Roof's heinous act of domestic terrorism/hate crime/murder is the tangible legacy of the Confederacy. It's time for us as Southerners to face the truth, to remove the symbols of this legacy from tax supported public spaces.
No, taking down the Confederate Blvd. sign from a predominately black neighborhood isn't going to fix our struggles with racism in Arkansas. But, you have to start somewhere, you can't treat a disease when you refuse to name the symptoms.
Excerpts from the secession statements:
Georgia:
"The people of Georgia having dissolved their political connection with the Government of the United States of America, present to their confederates and the world the causes which have led to the separation. For the last ten years we have had numerous and serious causes of complaint against our non-slave-holding confederate States with reference to the subject of African slavery.
Mississippi:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin."
South Carolina:
"A geographical line has been drawn across the Union, and all the States north of that line have united in the election of a man to the high office of President of the United States, whose opinions and purposes are hostile to slavery. He is to be entrusted with the administration of the common Government, because he has declared that that "Government cannot endure permanently half slave, half free," and that the public mind must rest in the belief that slavery is in the course of ultimate extinction.
This sectional combination for the submersion of the Constitution, has been aided in some of the States by elevating to citizenship, persons who, by the supreme law of the land, are incapable of becoming citizens; and their votes have been used to inaugurate a new policy, hostile to the South, and destructive of its beliefs and safety.
On the 4th day of March next, this party will take possession of the Government. It has announced that the South shall be excluded from the common territory, that the judicial tribunals shall be made sectional, and that a war must be waged against slavery until it shall cease throughout the United States.'
Texas:
Texas was received [into the Union] as a commonwealth holding, maintaining and protecting the institution known as negro slavery-- the servitude of the African to the white race within her limits-- a relation that had existed from the first settlement of her wilderness by the white race, and which her people intended should exist in all future time. Her institutions and geographical position established the strongest ties between her and other slave-holding States of the confederacy. Those ties have been strengthened by association. But what has been the course of the government of the United States, and of the people and authorities of the non-slave-holding States, since our connection with them?
The controlling majority of the Federal Government, under various pretences and disguises, has so administered the same as to exclude the citizens of the Southern States, unless under odious and unconstitutional restrictions, from all the immense territory owned in common by all the States on the Pacific Ocean, for the avowed purpose of acquiring sufficient power in the common government to use it as a means of destroying the institutions of Texas and her sister slaveholding States."