Confederacy Represents Slavery and Racism, Not Pride


On a famous episode of the classic 1970s sitcom “Good Times,” Michael Evans (Ralph Carter) finds himself in trouble after he gets into an altercation while selling Chicago Defender newspapers.


Michael tells his father James (John Amos) that all he wanted to do by selling the Defender newspapers was to show and instill Black pride into the people of his community.


James’ response to Michael was that he was already Black, so just be proud.


That logic should apply to Southern Whites as well.


If you are already Southern, just be proud.


Southerners should not have to wave a Confederate flag in an intimidating way towards African-Americans just to show pride in their region of the country.


Flying a Confederate flag is simply a way of showing pride in racism and slavery and it is the most unpatriotic thing a citizen of the United States of America can actually do because the Confederacy almost destroyed our beloved country.


Furthermore, why should people from the North have Southern pride?


At the predominantly White Bay City Western High School in Michigan, the few Black students at the school have become victims of racial slurs, taunts and assault with the Confederate flag.


Lahoma Buckley, the grandmother of a student at the school, said a line of pickup trucks displaying the Confederate flag began circling the school recently in an attempt to bully her grandson.


Buckley claims that White students have taunted her Black grandson with racial slurs and the Confederate flag.


“He told me that this kid stuck the Confederate flag under (his) nose…and said, ‘Someone gave me five bucks to show you this,’ and just before that another student says to him, ‘Do slaves have feelings?’ And then uses his name, (that he) doesn’t have feelings,” Buckley said.


She added that her grandson’s football teammates have called him the N-word several times.


“They were calling him the N-word,” she said. “Everyday he goes to school with his stomach in knots not knowing if he’s going to be confronted with someone trying to push his buttons again.”


Buckley added that the Confederate flag stands for racism and parents and children already know that.

Those who believe that the Confederacy and the Confederate flag represent Southern pride and not oppression and racism are ignorant, racist or both.


The Confederacy differed from the North in several respects.


The Southern states believed in the moral integrity of slavery.


Confederate states believed that the White man was naturally superior to their African-American counterparts.


Furthermore, those states were protective of their rights to own African-American people as slaves.


Those that say the Confederacy was about states’ rights are technically correct. But the states’ rights they were concerned about were states’ right to legally own African-American people as slaves.


The South wanted to maintain slavery because of slavery’s impact on the economy of the Southern states versus the industrial North.


The argument for states’ rights coming out of the South only intensified after new free states became a part of the union, which diluted the Senate votes of the Southern slave states.


As long as there were just as many slave states as free states, the Southern states did not worry as much about having their opinions ignored in the Senate.

 

Many Southern states began to close ranks after the 1831 slave revolt of Nat Turner when their grip on African-American servitude began to loosen significantly.


The Southern states truly feared a radical change in their way of life midway through the 19th century.


Many anti-slavery newspapers and newsletters were prohibited in the South and the publishers often endured death threats.


The South apparently found justification for its fears when Northerner John Brown attempted an unsuccessful raid on the South’s arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Va. in 1859.


After the election of President Abraham Lincoln in 1860, many Southerners saw his presidency as an act of war.


Some Southerners believed that soldiers were going to come down South and seize their slaves and force White women to marry African-American men.


After seven states seceded from the Union, Jefferson Davis became the first president of the Confederate States of America. Four other states eventually joined the Confederacy.


The Confederate constitution upheld the institution of slavery but prohibited the African slave trade.


The fear, secession of Southern states leading to the Confederacy and the election of President Lincoln led to the country’s only Civil War, which eventually decimated the South and fractured the nation like never before.


That is the story of the Confederacy in a nutshell.


So for those who think that the above “dissertation” was all about Southern pride, they must be ignorant to history or just willfully disregarding the ugly truth behind the Confederacy.


The Confederacy, which centered on slavery, was ungodly.


The Confederacy was unpatriotic.


And the Confederacy was racist.


No one, Northern or Southern, should take pride in those aforementioned adjectives.


“If your child puts a flag in his pocket, on his belt buckle, on his truck or whatever today, to show strength or force or whatever, you need to take another look at what you’ve allowed him to do or her—because you’ve humiliated my grandson,” said Buckley.


While people who support the Confederacy are well within their constitutional rights to do so, do not be delusional as to what the Confederacy represented.


Nowhere was pride mentioned as a reason for secession and the Civil War.


Only an idiot would risk their lives by going to war just for pride in a region.


The Civil War was about keeping African-Americans in bondage so that the South could continue to make money off of free labor.


Although First Amendment rights should be protected, First Amendment rights do not always extend to the classroom.


If a person or group of people is being intimidated while trying to receive an education, one group’s First Amendment rights do not overrule the other group’s civil rights.


Even if the flag was about Southern pride, which it is not, pride does not come before protection.


Southern pride does not give a person the right to intimidate someone else.


Southern pride does not give a person the right to bully someone at school.

 

If you are from the South, although many of these Michigan high school students are not, just be proud of that heritage without becoming hateful of someone else just because of the color of their skin.

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