ate: Thu, 31 Oct 2019 17:06:46 -0400
From: Brad Page
Subject: Our not so civil war
When folks get together and protest the flags and statues connected to the American Civil War such as we’re seeing in downtown Pittsboro I think of a number of things from the 1850’s and 1860’s and how they shape our images of ourselves now in 2019.
There’s the sorrow of those men who were killed on the Union and Confederate sides: 600,000+ and the families who were permanently scarred with the violence and hatred of that bloody endless struggle.
There are the now-passed 4,000,000 slaves across the South and the 34,000+ North Carolina slave owners.
Then the long years of the Jim Crow South -1870’s to 1965 – and the lynchings and state enforced segregation in all imaginable ways and at all levels in all the former Confederate states and those God-awful plantations.
Is this who we are? Do we now have to consider ourselves more human than those non-white people who were considered 2/3. of a human being, men, women, children by paying obeisance to the so-called “history” of our downtown symbols? I don’t think so.
I was raised in the America of the 1940’s and 1950’s – in California, Arizona, New Hampshire, etc., etc. I came to the South in 1957. Like many whites I denied the obvious misery that was everywhere around me. Like many liberal-progressive-socialist Americans I denied my bigotry, that deep impulse in the heart of most US whites given generously to us by successfully enslaving millions of Africans and enriching ourselves across many generations. We still do with hidden biases and discrimination.
It doesn’t come into the open until some of our fellow citizens, our neighbors, our working partners and friends clarify our denial by drawing us back into those years that were and are so miserable for a whole minority of non-white Americans. Those who worship the battle flag (not the real Confederate flag) of the Army of Northern Virginia and the statue in the Pittsboro circle know and yearn for the Jim Crow years.
Now is the time, in this moment, that we say “NO, NEVER AGAIN” and begin to pay the full cost laid upon us by that 4-year war that reshaped the whole country. Our Founding Fathers did not face the fact of slavery when they created this country and its Constitution. I’m not going back to before 1965 and neither should you. That symbol of those times in Pittsboro needs to be removed. NOW
Brad Page