“A Memorial for the Confederacy” September 13, 2020 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
Wisdom lesson Mississippi State legislature’s 1861 declaration of
secession from the union:
A
Declaration of the Immediate Causes which Induce and Justify the Secession of
the State of Mississippi from the Federal Union.
In the
momentous step which our State has taken of dissolving its connection with the
government of which we so long formed a part, it is but just that we should
declare the prominent reasons which have induced our course.
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.
I hail from a long line of clergy; it skipped a few
generations at times, but we seemed to keep coming back to the family trade. I
am directly descended from Rev. John Rogers, the side of the family from which
I received my first name. John’s career as an English clergyman came to a
sudden end one day in 1555 when Mary Queen of Scots had him burned alive at the
stake. An event which evidently put the desire to go to seminary on ice in my
family for a few generations. But always the rebels, it was Edmund Rogers who
found, after the fall of Cromwell, that it was time to give up the island nation
which had been our home, to come to America.
Edmund Rogers distinguished himself in service during the
Revolutionary War and later settled to farm in southern Kentucky, founding the
small town that bears his name, Edmonton, KY.
For more than two centuries my patriarchal family managed a
large farm there, and for most of the first half of it, it was a prosperous slave
plantation. I grew up near the family farm hearing stories about the good ol
days before the Civil War had plunged my family into poverty. A hundred years
after the war, they were still repeating stories that included lots of
apologetics for the 19th century version of my ancestor’s lives.
My great grandmother, Nina Biggs, told me that she had been
cared for as a child by a former slave who had not left family service because the
slaves were well provided for and they were happy being slaves. I helped to mow
the family cemetery where slaves were buried in a corner of the family
graveyard.
I went to school with black kids who had my family name and
we assumed that they were descendants of the freed slaves from the family
plantation. What I did not allow myself to consider until many years later, is
that they were probably also my cousins.
In high school, my history teachers told us that the Civil
War was not really about slavery. The real issue, we were told, is that the
south had produced the raw materials for the industrialized northern states but
when southern states started to industrialize, to process and weave their own
cotton and wool, that it economically threatened the north and so the Yankees
attacked us. I was told, in history class, by my teachers, that slavery was
used as a cover for a war of what they called, “Northern aggression.”
A monument to “Our Confederate Dead”
still stands on the courthouse lawn in my hometown. An essay I published in the
Glasgow Daily Times a few years ago, urging my hometown peers to move it to a
nearby graveyard so that it would not appear to be a reflection of our city
government was met with dozens of death threats and a very demanding letter
from my brother, who still lives there, to never write for the Glasgow Daily
Times again.
The myth is that such memorials represent southern heritage.
The claim is made that it is not about racism. These statues and memorials
represent our pride in our ancestors, and they honor their memory. It is all a
part of the fabric of the myth that the descendants of slave owners wove for
themselves. That myth normalized the southern culture of which slavery was a
part in much the same way that turning corn into bourbon and eating grits with
your eggs was just a part of the culture.
Of course, then along comes a history teacher like our own
Dr. David Adams who read our wisdom lesson today, directly reading from the Mississippi
State legislature’s 1861 declaration of secession from the union which very
plainly gives the lie to the myth about the causes of the Civil War, stating
plainly, “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of
slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world.”
Arguing imperiously that the products of the agricultural
south were crucial to the world but explaining, “none but the black race can
bear exposure to the tropical sun.” Saying, in effect, you know, we don’t
want to be slave owners, but you can’t seriously expect white people to work in
the hot sun!
The historical fact is that the Civil War was about slavery.
It is also a historical fact that almost all of these statues were not put up
at the end of the war to honor those who had been traitors to the United States,
but they were erected during the Jim Crow era, along with the rise of the KKK.
More were added during the Civil Rights Movement, always as an assertion by the
white majority that equal rights would never be given to black people.
But it became a part of the background of southern life.
White people had the luxury of displaying Dixie flags and talking endearingly
about the south as if the myths were true and there was no harm done in our
history of slavery. Even as
recently as 1989, the generally liberal singing trio, now named the
“Chicks” were known as the “Dixie Chicks” for nearly 30 years. I’m not sure
that their new name would pass muster with many feminists these days but even
with that moniker’s problems, they sure didn’t want to continue to use “Dixie”
in their name.
I am sure that many of the people we know would write off all
of this movement to ban Confederate flags, tear down Confederate monuments, and
even to scrub our language of references to the Confederacy that help to hide
the horrors of our early history in slavery as a matter of political
correctness, of liberals trying to change history, or even of a kind of cancel
culture. But the truth is that symbols, statues, flags, names of Universities
and military bases do make a difference.
If you cannot immediately see the connection between the
culture of accepting Confederate flags and monuments in our midst and the fact
that a white cop and shoot an unarmed black man in the back seven times then I
hope you will 
understand it before you finish reading this.
There is a reason why the police drove right past 17-year old,
Kyle Rittenhouse, even though he was out after curfew, was carrying an illegal
weapon, and had just shot and killed two people and literally nodded at him,
even as people in the streets were loudly identifying him as the shooter, but
the police will shoot unarmed black men in the back, even when they pose no
threat. If you still don’t see the connection to the fixtures of institutional
racism to the way that black people are treated by employers, in the courts,
and in law enforcement, then let me fix your glasses.
Why is there so much
resistance to things like changing the name of the
Edmund Pettus bridge to the John
Lewis bridge?
I mean, other than Dr. Adams, does anyone here even know who
Edmund Pettus was, beyond the vague fact that he was a part of the Confederacy?
Lots of people fought in the Civil War. Pettus got a bridge named after him
because he was one of the first Grand Dragons of the KKK. That’s a part of
Alabama history, for sure, but not especially a good part . . . not something
that should get your name on a public works project.
There are things that are undeniably
a part of history that don’t deserve a public monument. Mary Queen of Scots played a very distinct
role in my family history but even 500 years after she had Rev. John Rogers
burned alive, I don’t need a portrait of her in my living room to remind me of
what this Catholic anti-Reformationist did. Do you know, she was only 13 years
old when she ordered Rev. Rogers taken from prison and burned alive . . . who
gives that kind of power to a hormonal teenager? You don’t have to be mad for
me, but you can see why I’m kinda mad that after 500 years of not having a
statue of Mary in Scotland, someone put one up recently. That’s on my list of
monuments to deface. But I digress . . .
Back to the topic at hand, I think
that the final word in the argument about taking these Confederate statues down
was published in the New York Times on June 26th. It is in a piece written by
the Vanderbilt professor, Caroline Randall Williams. I don’t normally read this long of
a passage from someone else’s pen but please indulge me to read a few
paragraphs from her essay:
I
have rape-colored skin. My light-brown-blackness is a living testament to the
rules, the practices, the causes of the Old South.
If
there are those who want to remember the legacy of the Confederacy, if
they want monuments, well, then, my body is a monument. My skin is a monument.
Dead
Confederates are honored all over this country — with cartoonish private statues,
solemn public monuments and even in the names of United States Army bases. It
fortifies and heartens me to witness the protests against this practice and the growing
clamor from serious, nonpartisan public servants to
redress it. But there are still those — like President
Trump and
the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell —
who cannot understand the difference between rewriting and reframing the past.
I say it is not a matter of “airbrushing” history, but of adding a new
perspective.
I am a
black, Southern woman, and of my immediate white male ancestors, all of them
were rapists. My very existence is a relic of slavery and Jim Crow . . . I am the descendant of black women who were
domestic servants and white men who raped their help.
I am more than half white, and none
of it was consensual. White Southern men — my ancestors — took what they wanted
from women they did not love, over whom they had extraordinary power, and then failed
to claim their children.
What is a monument but a standing
memory? An artifact to make tangible the truth of the past. My body and blood
are a tangible truth of the South and its past. The black people I come from
were owned by the white people I come from. The white people I come from fought
and died for their Lost Cause. And I ask you now, who dares to tell me to
celebrate them? Who dares to ask me to accept their mounted pedestals?
You cannot dismiss me as someone who
doesn’t understand. You cannot say it wasn’t my family members who fought and
died. My blackness does not put me on the other side of anything. It puts me
squarely at the heart of the debate. I don’t just come from the South. I come
from Confederates. I’ve got rebel-gray blue blood coursing my veins. My
great-grandfather Will was raised with the knowledge that Edmund Pettus was his
father. Pettus, the storied Confederate general, the grand dragon of the Ku
Klux Klan, the man for whom Selma’s Bloody Sunday Bridge is named. So I am not
an outsider who makes these demands. I am a great-great-granddaughter.
So far as I am concerned, Professor Williams has said the
last thing that needs to be said on this topic. There is no defense, no excuse,
for the public display of Confederate monuments. The Confederates were traitors
who sought to defend the institution of slavery in a country that had the
temerity to speak of freedom and liberty.
As a white man in America, while my family has boasted many
scholars, scientists, and pastors, I cannot dare speak of that fact without
also apologizing for the undeniable fact that my blood lines also contain slave
owners, slave traders, and very probably slave rapists and while there is no
way to go back in time and undo those tragic, unjust, criminal and immoral
events, there is no way that any self-respecting white person in the country should
not be the first in line to hold the rope that pulls down the Confederate
monuments.
Their history of human chattel slavery, physical abuse and
undeniable rape is a part of our history, but it is a part for which we must
apologize and seek to amend.
It is interesting, isn’t it, that when we object to police
shooting unarmed black men in the back that people think that we are being
critical of the police in general. Is shooting unarmed black men so much a part
of policing that people seriously can’t separate the two? I mean, what would
policing be if you took away the part about shooting unarmed black men in the
back? The fact that people cannot seem to imagine objecting to police over use
of lethal force without objecting to police entirely is why we have to make
some deep cultural changes. It means that we change the way we talk. . . when
someone says “black lives matter,” don’t ever reply with some inane, “blue
lives matter” or worse yet, “all lives matter.” If someone tells you that their
mother just died, do you correct them and say “All mothers die?” We announce
that black lives matter because that has not been clear through the past 400
years of American history.
And we pull down Confederate monuments because while the
Confederacy is a part of our heritage, it is a part of our history in the same
way that Nazis and the holocaust are a part of German history and while there
may be some right wing German groups that would love to put up statues of
history, the German people know to keep telling those racist nuts to sit down
and shut up.
So, in that spirit, all that is left to say to those among us
who still want to defend Confederate flags, monuments, and names, let me say
this in the nicest way that I know how:
And if telling you to sit down and shut up doesn’t sound all
that nice, let me invite you to imagine what I might have said if we were not
in church. This case, men and women, is closed.
