The Confederacy 2.0

It’s Confederate Heritage Month again in Mississippi. Let’s look at some of that Confederate heritage.

Let’s start here. Here’s then Lieutenant Governor Tate Reeves addressing the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) in Vicksburg back in 2013. I point out the time since Reeves addressed the SCV because it wasn’t that long ago. Just twelve years.

Definitely Confederate heritage right there.

Photo: Vicksburg SCV Facebook page

But these days, now-Governor Reeves doesn’t announce the “celebration” of Confederate Heritage Month himself, he issues the proclamation, but he lets the SCV have the “honor” of publicly announcing it. Hmm, wonder why that is?

Here is his proclamation, you’d think he’d be proud enough of it to put it out publicly himself.

But this “lovely” picture of Gov. Tate Reeves and his proclamation is just the beginning.

CONTENT WARNING: RACIST CONTENT/IMAGES

The Civil War, and ostensibly the Confederacy, ended in 1865, one hundred and sixty years ago this month.

So, in “honor” of Mississippi’s Confederate Heritage Month, here’s an article defending segregation, published sixty years ago this month.

Real Confederate heritage right here.

One hundred years later, in April of 1965, the popular Saturday Evening Post magazine featured an article by Dr. Clayton Sullivan, a Harvard-educated Mississippi pastor, titled Integration Could Destroy Rural Mississippi. That’s only sixty years ago. This article came out just four years before I did.

Dr. Clayton was the pastor of the First Baptist Church of Tylertown, a Southern Baptist church. Tylertown is a tiny town in Walthall County, in the southern part of Mississippi.

This is where I’m from.

This magazine was part of a relative’s estate; I donated it to the Mississippi Department of Archives and History.

The article is Dr. Clayton’s perspective; he felt strongly enough about it to write this for a leading national magazine at the time. Dr. Clayton was expressing what many, if not most, white people in Mississippi thought at the time. And probably quite a few still do today.

This is Confederate Heritage y’all. One hundred years removed from the Confederacy. These are the people who closed the pools instead of integrating them.

Today we are seeing a parallel push with new attempts to “whitewash” American history. It’s things like this they want to hide.

Just like the years after the Civil War. The Confederates wanted to rewrite the history of the war to look more heroic and maintain white supremacy. Sounds eerily familiar…

This “whitewashing” of our history is the “Lost Cause” propaganda, pushed by the SCV and the United Daughters of the Confederacy after the Civil War, attempting to redefine what the Civil War was about, and trying to say, “It wasn’t about slavery, it was about state’s rights,” etc. They installed statues and state constitutions to enforce their white supremacy.

And now we see a new push to do the same kind of “whitewash”.

One hundred and sixty years removed from the Civil War and the old Confederacy, it seems we are staring at the same people. A new Confederacy. A New Confederacy that brought its old flag into our national Capitol building on January 6th, 2021.

Confederate heritage at work y’all.

And like the old Confederates, the new ones were pardoned.

History repeats. The whitewashing begins again.

We are doomed to repeat this cycle until we face the reality of our country’s history.

The language of the proclamation isn’t entirely wrong and actually addresses this. We would do well to examine the heritage of the Confederacy “earnestly” and honestly. To look at the failed original Reconstruction and really fully pick up that work again. During Reconstruction Mississippi seated the first two Black senators in Congress – Sen. Hiram Revels and Sen. Blanche Bruce.

But today, Mississippi has a sitting senator, Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith who talked about “a public hanging” during her campaign against a Black man for her seat.

Mississippi stay Mississippi-ing, y’all.

But so much the better for the rest of America, right? I mean, when you have Mississippi and the rest of the South to look down on as being horrible and racist, you can feel better about your place in this country’s racist and genocidal history. “We’re not racist like they are in Mississippi and the South…”

This scapegoating stands in the way of the long overdue reckoning and reflection nationally on this heritage of hate we all carry.

Some of the most contentious integration bussing cases were in Yonkers, New York and Boston, Massachusetts. Please look up Howard Beach, New York 1986. While the fight was going on in the south for voting rights in 1964, California was repealing the Rumsford Fair Housing Act so they could deny housing based on race.

You know that slogan for Dunkin Donuts “America Runs on Dunkin”? Nah. America runs on racism. Always has.

But don’t ask Gov. Reeves about it. He says, “systemic racism doesn’t exist.” Never mind the 1890 Mississippi Constitution was drawn up entirely to ensure white supremacy, and it’s the Constitution in force today in Mississippi.

And the new 47 regime is showing us every day that systemic racism absolutely does exist. At least Dr. Clayton acknowledges slavery once in this piece; Gov. Reeves never does in his proclamation.

So then, let’s do what the proclamation says. Let’s “reflect upon our nation’s past to gain insight from our mistakes and our successes, and…carefully and earnestly strive to understand” our shared history so we can do better by everyone who suffers at the hands of our Confederate heritage.