An Inch Today, A Mile Tomorrow: The Problem With Neo-Confederates

I left Mississippi the day its citizens overwhelmingly voted to keep the Confederate symbol on the state’s flag, by the time the returns came in, I was safely tucked in the state of Texas, far away from the madding Confederate crowds of Mississippi. My departure was not by design but purely coincidental. I thought I had left the issue of the Confederacy the day I loaded my chuck wagon and rode west but on the 21st day of June of 2001, a member of one of the cyber communities in which I am an occasional participant wrote a very interesting contribution to the BlackPlanet.com forum on the issue of the Confederate flag. Her article was so interesting I was forced to save it with the hope that I would get to read it more thoroughly than I would normally do with most of the contributions on internet fora (forums). She made a number of points, just like one of the neo-Confederate correspondents had made during our banter. Both of them often said that changing the flag was basically a moot point.

I am in absolute agreement with the statement in which she said, and I quote: “Whether or not the Rebel flag is flying, people will still be prejudice.” Like most blacks, at least those who want to see a society in which we all co-exist in an atmosphere of peace and eternal brotherhood, the mere sight of the Confederate flag would evoke a spasm of anger down my marrow. At first I felt that the flag ought to be forcibly consigned to the trashcan of history, the dumpster of infamy where it right belongs. However, I quickly realized that it was an exercise in futility. The flag itself was nothing but a mere physical and visually discernible manifestation of something bigger and almost indelible, a symbol of deeply seated insensitivity in the hearts of people who will invoke the name of God at the slightest offer of an excuse. It is an irony peculiar to the south, an area with such a profusion of churches one could be forgiven were he or she to assume there was a church for every ten street lamps in some of the region’s towns, hamlets and villages. The ungodliness of the said insensitivity in the midst of the fabled “Bible Belt” is a paradox, and I put it very lightly.

Interestingly, one morning on my way to work, I was flipping through the radio stations since I was tired of the asinine chatter on the R&B stations I normally listen to when I stumbled upon a Christian radio station. The preacher was talking about Robert E. Lee, exulting his virtues and gallantry during the Civil War. How could a man who fought to keep fellow human beings in bondage and a state no higher than that of half-domesticated animals only good for tilling the land or selling to the next highest bidder to alleviate some monetary difficult be considered a symbol of virtue? Lee might have prophesied and rallied his beleaguered troops by citing scriptures but Jesus himself warned against Lee’s ilk. Many will prophecy and cast demons using his name but that do not necessarily mean they are right, Jesus said in the 7th Chapter of the Book of Matthew. “When the day of reckoning comes, I will tell them: Get thee away from me you doers of evil.” Jesus explicitly warned his followers to be careful of such Bible-quoting and Hallelujah-chanting games of conmanship because “by the fruits they bear,” it would be easy to tell that they are crooks.

That is precisely the problem with the apologists for slavery. They have engaged in this game of conmanship such that they have also started to believe that the words and statments they use to defend the Confederacy are the inviolate truth rather than some very sickening act of deception far more deadly than bowing down to mammon. The lack of shame by preachers who still sermonize over the “virtues of soldiers” who toiled for the cause of the Confederacy a hundred and thirty five years after the war or the scorned, trailer-park dwelling, tobacco-chewing and poverty-stricken belligerent “white trash” who puts a Confederate sticker on his battered jalopy from the 1950s just proves the enormity of the task of erasing the hatred and backwardness harbored by the neo-Confederates. Removing a flag is like giving an ailing man aspirin when major surgery is the only recourse.

Like I said before, I realized that removing the Confederate flag would not solve anything. If anything, it would only inflame the volatile tempers of the partially sane sympathizers of the perpetuation of the Peculiar Institution, the real cause of the Confederacy serpentine agenda. During my years in Mississippi, I had the opportunity to watch the flag issue at a dangerously close range I almost got caught in the crossfire. I was working at the University of Southern Mississippi which nestles right in the midst of the county named in honor of the man who was a feared slave trader along the Mississippi River before the outbreak of the Civil War (or the War of Liberation, as grateful blacks who had just been freed because of it lovingly and correctly called it), a man who fought so tenaciously to preserve his means of livelihood and, when the doomed Confederate crumbled to the ground as was inevitable, was at the fore of the Ku Klux Klan right from its inception as it killed and maimed with impunity. Yes, for four years I lived in a county named after the notorious Nathan Bedford Forrest, the “honorary” founding father of the Ku Klux Klan.

I concede it would take more than the removal of a flag to wash away the perfidy of neo-Confederacy. Neo-Confederates are not confined to the lower rungs of southern social strata. They are everywhere. We even had a history professor, Dr Scarborough, teaming up with another geriatric, Mr F. Scott Farris who played an organ at one of the local Catholic churches, to fight for the preservation of the flag. No one was immune from the venomous saliva these two loved to shower at anyone who gave the slightest hint at the self-evident Satanism of the Confederacy. These two were de facto guest columnists in the university’s biweekly paper, The Student Printz that I jokingly referred to as the Scarborough-Farris biweekly since the said gentlemen had columns in virtually every issue notwithstanding that no opposing views ever saw the light of the day. The neo-Confederates of Forrest County are such a feared force even unto this day such that the local media will tuck their tails between their hind legs in fear.

A good example of this kowtow behavior and supine coverage of the Confederate flag or the falsehood of Confederate heritage is offered by Jim Cameron, the president of WDAM, a local television station. In one of his regular oral editorials, he said, and I paraphrase his statement in which he in effect said that “the issue of Mississippi’s flag is about heritage of its people but should be resolved through a referendum.” Inherent in this argument is the fact that the word people denotes only whites thus relegating the native Americans and African Americans who are an integral part of the history of the south. It is an argument that smacks of white supremacy. By no means is Mr Cameron an apologist for the Confederacy as his editorials will aptly prove but as a businessman, he knows from which side his bread is buttered. In this case, the neo-Confederates constitute a sizeable size of the local market and economy. To say anything that may annoy them would be akin to killing the proverbial goose that lays the golden eggs.

The erudite Jim Cameron commits what has become the standard and incredulously often-quoted excuse for lionizing individuals who not only took up arms against this nation but also sought to abrogate God’s edict of the equality of mankind using an armed and bloody insurrection; citing the celebration of culture and history as the excuse for honoring common-law criminals who would have been dragged to the world courts of the Hague for human-rights violations were they alive today, crimes for which they would receive no less a lenient sentence than a richly deserved hanging. It is a very self-evident falsehood that ought to bring shame particularly if we consider the fact that the Civil War or the Confederacy lasted no more than five years, a life span shorter than that of a Drosophila melanogaster, the fruit fly, so to speak. Take South Carolina for instance; the Confederacy period is less than two percent of the state’s history thus buttressing the argument that the issue of history is nothing but a very simple fallacy. When it comes to culture, it is simply inconceivable that the south could have established even a mere skeletal culture in less than five years bearing in mind the south’s antebellum backwardness and general illiteracy, necessities for the sustenance of its pseudo aristocracy so loved by the landed gentry.

Before addressing the fabled heritage, which goes back right to the day the first indentured laborers set foot on the colonies, it is necessary to touch on the other common excuse. One often hears that the whites who had no land or if they had, wallowed in the miserable valleys of peonage, only picked up arms to protect their homes from invaders. Sherman did not begin his march until much later in the war. By then an inordinate number of the poor whites had fully immersed itself in the south’s ill-fated unholy jihad. The poor of the south had been swindled into fight for the plantation owners even though the two groups had never liked each other right from the word go, the same animus still exists between the two groups. As an side, it is none other than the affluent whites who coined insulting terms like rednecks, flat feet or white trash to denote whites who were so poor they had to eke out a living by working in the fields in the blazing sun of the south thus causing sunburns of the uncovered necks; or whites who were too poor to afford the high-heeled shoes that symbolized the delicate fashion tastes of that time; or those of today who are too poor to own decent homes beyond the “white projects” or rural “ghetto” settlements commonly called trailer parks. Then as it is now, poor whites were considered shiftless, slovenly, morally depraved and a source of shame and constant embarrassment. Poor whites who had no stake in the fight and, if truth be said, should have fought on the side of their brethren in pain, the slaves, were duped into a fight that was none of their business. I am also of the opinion that a fair proportion of the poor whites decided to help their enemies hoping to win affection or some form of acceptance from the affluent pseudo aristocrats. Indigent whites had fatally deluded themselves into thinking they would triumph fighting alongside the rich thus earning some reprieve from the scorn and insults they had endured from the rich before the war. Simply put, the idea that poor whites would not have fought for the preservation of slavery if the “Yankees did not attack southern homes, children and women” is a shameless lie. It is a myth that is closely tied to the culture-heritage angle.

The culture or heritage of the south is that of feudalism, a peculiar and unique variety made notorious and will be indelibly noted in the history of humanity because of the heartlessness and excesses of its institution of slavery. As much as the modern-day apologists for the Confederate cause may try to argue otherwise, they will ultimately fail because of the recorded documents written or spoken by the major participants of that war. Documents or speeches by various southern individuals abound and there is one website dedicated to these documents, documents that furnish ample evidence to clarify the so-called southern heritage: Jefferson Davis gave two memorable speeches; one on the senate floor upon resigning and the other on the steps of the Alabama state legislature in Montgomery: The commissioner of state the of Louisiana gave a passionate speech at the Texas secession convention: Governor Joe Brown of Georgia had two open letters in the Atlanta Constitution. These are not the only documented words that damn the neo-Confederates. Most of the seceding states published their motives for seceding and that of the State of Mississippi is quite poignant in its simplicity and forthrightness.

To demystify some of the myths that are commonly spread by the neo-Confederates, a close inspection of some of these documents is a good starting point. Jefferson Davis told his erstwhile colleagues on the floor of the US Senate that he objected to the equality of blacks, disparagingly reminding everyone that “negroes were three fifths human, and only in numerical proportions.” Jefferson Davis felt that that numerical estimation was overly generous.

In the constitution of the Confederate States of America, Article IV, Section 3 (3), the second sentence declares: “ … the institution of slavery, as it now exists in the Confederate States, shall be recognized and protected …” The Mississippi Declaration of Causes is even more candid:

“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.”

The Confederates of Mississippi do not beat about the bush. They are straight talkers. In the above quoted document, they constantly harped on the issue of slavery and the dangers of its abolition, constantly attacking the Ordinance of 1787 in which: “It has grown until it denies the right of property in slaves, and refuses protection to that right on the high seas, in the Territories, and wherever the government of the United States had jurisdiction.” In addition to that, Mississippi was angry because: “[The Ordinance] refuses the admission of new slave States into the Union, and seeks to extinguish it by confining it within its present limits, denying the power of expansion.” In the same document, Mississippi attacks the Ordinance for “[nullifying] the Fugitive Slave Law in almost every free State in the Union, and has utterly broken the compact which our fathers pledged their faith to maintain.” To prove beyond a scintilla of doubt over the cause of the Civil War, the people of Mississippi left us this historical complained: “[The Ordinance] advocates negro equality, socially and politically ... in our midst.”

The words of Louisiana’s representative, George Williamson, to the Texas Secession Convention in March 9, 1861, are equally damning. He clearly stipulated why it was necessary for Texas to secede, saying: “Louisiana looks to the formation of a Southern confederacy to preserve the blessings of African slavery … ” and goes on to point out that the two states have a common commercial interest based on agriculture since; “… both States have large areas of fertile, uncultivated lands, peculiarly adapted to slave labor; and they are both so deeply interested in African slavery that it may be said to be absolutely necessary to their existence, and is the keystone to the arch of their prosperity.” Like a monotonous hymn during a Sunday service, he constantly harped on the theme of slavery reminding the people of Texas that: “The people of Louisiana would consider it a most fatal blow to African slavery, if Texas either did not secede or having seceded should not join her destinies to theirs in a Southern Confederacy … ” and that “The people of the slaveholding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery.”

Of all the damning words by the leaders of the Confederacy, none have the unbridled recklessness of Georgia’s governor, the bearded Joseph Brown. Writing in an open letter to the on Dec. 7, 1860, he said: “[Abraham Lincoln was] the mere instrument of a great triumphant political party, the principles of which are deadly hostile to the institution of Slavery …” In the same letter, he touches on the economic and social ramifications of the termination of slavery. This part is eye-opening and only quoting it in its totality can prove with the utmost alacrity why slavery was the issue, not just a mere public gimmick to stifle “state rights.” He says:

“What effect will the abolition of slavery have upon the interest and social position of the large class of non-slaveholders and poor white laborers in the South? Here would be the scene of the most misery and ruin. Probably no one is so unjust as to say that it would be right to take from the slaveholder his property without paying for it. What would it cost to do this? There are, in round numbers, 4,500,000 slaves in the Southern States. They are worth, at a low estimate, 500 dollars each. All will agree to this. Multiply the 4,500,000 by the 500 and you have twenty-two hundred and fifty millions of dollars, which these slaves are worth. No one would agree that it is right to rob the Southern slaveholders of this vast sum of money without compensation. The Northern States would not agree to pay their proportion of the money, and the people of the South must be taxed to raise the money. If Georgia were only an average Southern State, she would have to pay one-fifteenth part of this sum, which would be $150,000,000. Georgia is much more than an average State, and she must therefore pay a larger sum. Her people now pay less than half a million dollars a year, of tax. Suppose we had ten years within which to raise the $150,000,000, we would then have to raise, in addition to our present tax, $15,000,000 per annum, or over thirty times as much as we now pay. -- The poor man, who now pays one dollar, would then have to pay $30.00. But suppose the Northern States agreed to help pay for these slaves, (who believes they would do it?) the share of Georgia would then be about one thirtieth of the twenty-two hundred and fifty millions of dollars, or over seventy-five millions; which, if raised in ten years, would be over fifteen times as much as our present tax. In this calculation, I have counted the slave-holder as taxed upon his own slaves to raise money to pay him for them. This would be a great injustice to him. If the sum is to be raised by the tax upon others, the non-slaveholders and poor white men of the South, would have to pay nearly the whole of this enormous sum, out of their labor. This would load them and their children with grievous indebtedness and heavy taxes for a long time to come. But suppose we were rid of this difficulty, what shall be done with these 4,500,000 negroes, when set free? Some of the Northern States have already passed laws prohibiting free negroes from coming into their limits. They will help to harbor our runaway slaves, but will not receive among them our free negroes. They would not permit them to go there and live with them. Then what? One may say, send them to Africa. To such a proposition I might reply, send them to the moon. You may say that is not practicable. It is quite as much so as it is for us to pay for and send this vast number of negroes to Africa, with the means at our command.

No one would be so inhuman as to propose to send them to Africa and set them down upon a wild, naked sea coast, without provisions for at least one year. What will it cost to take them from their present home to Africa, and carry provisions there to keep them a single year? (if left with only one year's supply, many of them would starve to death.) It cannot be done for $250.00 each. At that sum it would amount to eleven hundred and twenty-five millions of dollars. Where will we get the money? Our people must be taxed to raise it. This would be half as large a sum as the above estimate to the value of the negroes. If the Southern States had it to raise Georgia's part would be over $75,000,000, which added to the part of the amount to be paid to owners for the negroes, would amount to $225,000,000; which must be raised by taxing the people, or loading them with a debt which would virtually enslave our whole people for generations to come. It must be remembered that we own no territory in Africa large enough to colonize 4,500,000 people. This too must be bought at a very heavy cost. The Northern people would not consent to be taxed to raise these enormous sums, either to pay for the negroes, or to pay for sending them to Africa, or to pay for land upon which to colonize them; as they do not wish to do either. They wish to take them from their owners without pay, and set them free, and let them remain among us. Many people at the North, say that negroes are our fit associates; that they shall be set free, and remain among us-- intermarrying with our children, and enjoying equal privileges with us. But suppose we were over the difficulty of paying the owners for the negroes, and they were taken from their masters without pay, and set free and left among us, (which is the ultimate aim of the Black Republicans,) what would be the effect upon our society? We should still have rich men and poor men. But few of slave owners have invested all they have in negroes. Take their negroes from them unjustly, and they will many of them still be more wealthy than their neighbors. If all were left for a time with equal wealth, every person who has noticed man and society knows that, in a few years, some would grow rich and others poor. This has always been the case, and always will be. If we had no negroes, the rich would still be in a better condition to take care of themselves than the poor. They would still seek the most profitable and secure investment for their capital. What would this be? The answer suggests itself to every mind: it would be land. The wealthy would soon buy all the lands of the South worth cultivating. Then what? The poor would all become tenants, as they are in England, the New England States, and all old countries where slavery does not exist. But I must not lose sight of the 4,500,000 free negroes to be turned loose among us. They, too, must become tenants, with the poor white people for they would not be able to own lands. A large proportion of them would spend their time in idleness and vice, and would live by stealing, robbing and plundering. Probably one fourth of the whole number would have to be maintained in our penitentiary, prisons, and poor houses. Our people, poor and rich, must be taxed to pay the expenses of imprisoning and punishing them for crime. They would have to begin the world miserable poor, with neither land, money nor provisions. They must therefore become day laborers for their old masters, or such others as would employ them. In this capacity they would at once come in competition with the poor white laborers. Men of capital would see this, and fix the price of labor accordingly. The negro has only been accustomed to receive his victuals and clothes for his labor. Few of them, if free, would expect anything more. If would therefore be easy to employ them at a sum sufficient to supply only the actual necessaries of life. The poor white man would then go to the wealthy land-owner and say, I wish employment. Hire me to work. I have a wife and children who must have bread. The land-owner would offer probably twenty cents per day. The laborer would say, I cannot support my family on that sum. The landlord replies, “That is not my business. I am sorry for you, but I must look to my own interest. The black man who lives on my land has as strong an arm, and as heavy muscles as you have, and can do as much labor. He works for me at that rate, you must work for the same price, or I cannot employ you.” The negro comes into competition with the white man and fixes the price of his labor, and he must take it or get no employment.

The reader should note how the bearded conman that Joseph Brown was as he tried to make a case for the poor white. The poor whites were basically pushed aside because slavery offered free labor but Governor Brown continued with his lies, stating:

Again, the poor white man wishes to rent land from the wealthy landlord-- this landlord asks him half the crop of common upland or two thirds or even three fourths, for the best bottom land. The poor man says this seems very hard. I cannot make a decent support for my family at these rates. The landlord replies, here are negroes all around me anxious to take it at these rates; I can let you have it for no less. The negro therefore, comes into competition with the poor white man, when he seeks to rent land on which to make his bread, or a shelter to protect his wife and his little ones, from the cold and from the rain; and when he seeks employment as a day laborer. In every such case if the negro will do the work the cheapest, he must be preferred. It is sickening to contemplate the miseries of our poor white people under these circumstances. They now get higher wages for their labor than the poor of any other country on the globe. Most of them are land owners, and they are now respected. They are in no sense placed down upon a level with the negro. They are a superior race, and they feel and know it. Abolish slavery, and you make the negroes their equals, legally and socially (not naturally, for no human law can change God's law) and you very soon make them all tenants, and reduce their wages for daily labor to the smallest pittance that will sustain life. Then the negro and the white man, and their families, must labor in the field together as equals. Their children must go to the same poor school together, if they are educated at all. They must go to church as equals; enter the Courts of justice as equals, sue and be sued as equals, sit on juries together as equals, have the right to give evidence in Court as equals, stand side by side in our military corps as equals, enter each others' houses in social intercourse as equals; and very soon their children must marry together as equals. May our kind Heavenly Father avert the evil, and deliver the poor from such a fate. So soon as the slaves were at liberty, thousands of them would leave the cotton and rice fields in the lower parts of our State, and make their way to the healthier climate in the mountain region. We should have them plundering and stealing, robbing and killing, in all the lovely vallies of the mountains. This I can never consent to see. The mountains contain the place of my nativity, the home of my manhood, and the theatre of most of the acts of my life; and I can never forget the condition and interest of the people who reside there. It is true, the people there are generally poor; but they are brave, honest, patriotic, and pure hearted. Some who do not know them, have doubted their capacity to understand these questions, and their patriotism and valor to defend their rights when invaded. I know them well, and I know that no greater mistake could be made. They love the Union of our fathers, and would never consent to dissolve it so long as the constitution is not violated, and so long as it protects their rights; but they love liberty and justice more; and they will never consent to submit to abolition rule, and permit the evils to come upon them, which must result from a continuance in the Union when the government is in the hands of our enemies, who will use all its power for our destruction. When it becomes necessary to defend our rights against so foul a domination, I would call upon the mountain boys as well as the people of the lowlands, and they would come down like an avalanche and swarm around the flag of Georgia with a resolution that would strike terror into the ranks of the abolition cohorts of the North. Wealth is timid, and wealthy men may cry for peace, and submit to wrong for fear they may lose their money: but the poor, honest laborers of Georgia, can never consent to see slavery abolished, and submit to all the taxation, vassalage, low wages and downright degradation, which must follow. They will never take the negro's place; God forbid.”

It was an argument that eerily follows the same logic of George Williamson but went on to lay the foundation for segregation and today’s problem of racial profiling as well as the incomprehensible and asymmetrically harsh sentences meted out to crack-cocaine users who happen to be disproportionately black and the glove-hand treatment of powdered-cocaine users who happen to be inordinately rich and white.

These statements basically say what everyone knows; the Civil War was basically fought over the issue of slavery. Some revisionists would have us believe that the issue of slavery was nothing but a public-relations gimmick. Obviously the active participants in the secession categorically argue otherwise. As per the constitution, slavery was slated to begin its death march in the 1880s and, cognizant of this, pro-slavery forces in South Carolina started mumbling about seceding long before the Civil War. Senator John Calhoun of South Carolina was the most notorious member of this band of agitators, so notorious was he that even other southern secessionists deemed him too much of a livewire and prone to incendiary utterances he was a hazard to all. They kept away from him like he was the very personification of the dreaded seven Biblical plagues. He was part of a cabal that had constantly threatened to force the secession of South Carolina to get concessions from the US government and at one point in the 1830s, that genocidal racist, Andrew Jackson, had to send part of the US Navy to South Carolina just to shoot a warning salvo across the bow of the latter.

South Carolina would again threaten to secede from the Union along with Georgia unless the Cherokees were forcibly removed from their homes in the tri-state area of Georgia, South Carolina and Tennessee thus forcing Andrew Jackson to petulantly disregard the Supreme Court of the Unites States, SCOTUS, ruling that basically stated that the removal of Cherokees was illegal. South Carolina’s malfeasance was dictated by its desire to keep slavery in place. Agriculture was the state’s economic mainstay and the free labor from slaves meant prosperity.

There were other forces outside the political arena that understood the ramifications of the slave issue, forces sympathetic to the southern economic concerns, the SCOTUS, no less. It is quite tempting to put a word or two on the pro-slavery leanings of the Tarney Court particularly with regard to the shameful Dred Scott Case of 1857. In all honesty, it is a topic that requires a separate treatise of its own but suffice it to say that even the pro-slavery elements in the hallowed SCOTUS institution of the United States of America understood that the issue of slavery was critical in determining the direction the nation would take.

The most disconcerting aspect of this whole saga is that these facts are not taught in school. If students of American history are not being taught the immediate and underlying causes of one of the major events in the annals of the nation’s history, we have to wonder at the level ineptitude of our educational system. What exactly are these students of American history learning? That is the bare bodkin.

It is this deliberate perpetuation of the ignorance that has basically encouraged and emboldened neo-Confederates to crawl out of the foxholes they had been hiding in. Truth is what this nation owes itself and the future generations. There is a need to be truthful about this painful event in the nation’s history, much like the Germans have boldly confronted their own dark past. Over and above all, America’s descendants of slaves have a moral duty and debt of gratitude to their ancestors and every soul that perished in efforts to end slavery. The duty and paying that debt begin with the unwavering teaching of the factual history of the Civil War or the War of Liberation along with the issue of slavery. It took the blood of white Yankee boys to liberate the slaves and the very least the liberated blacks should do is show some gratitude.

If the general ambivalence I witnessed in Mississippi during the flag debate is any indication of where blacks stand, it is a very hopeless situation. The Civil Rights activists can march up and down the breath of the south but it would be a complete waste of time unless there is a concerted effort to counter the neo-Confederate lies with historical facts. These are facts that should be taught in school, in Sunday school classes, to jail inmates and to children at home. Instead of only reminiscing about black history one month in a year, blacks ought to think, teach and talk about black history everyday. Rather than waste breathe yapping about basketball and football in barbershops all the time, there ought to be enough room to discuss historical facts. Unless people know their history, it would be very difficult to understand the hardships they face everyday. Whether we like it or not, these daily struggles have their roots in the past. It is only when we know the historical genesis of current problems that meaningful solutions needed to permanently redress the social, political and economic problems we all face can be formulated and implemented.

The gimmicks we witness by the so-called black leaders in pin-stripped suits leading throngs in marching, singing and giving poetic speeches, for which they are handsomely paid, have been proven to be ineffective. It is probably why most blacks have drifted back into a state of hopelessness thus accounting for the ambivalence I saw in Mississippi. We can only hope and pray that this lack of concern was an aberration otherwise the Klan will be marching again in broad-day light just like in the 1920s. You give the neo-Confederates an inch today and tomorrow they will take a mile; the flag today and the reinstitution of the Jim Crow laws tomorrow and the inexplicably disproportional number of young black men in prisons is a harbinger of that.

This article may not be used or redistributed without the written approval of the author.