There’s an old cemetery a few miles from my home. Several weeks ago, flags with three bars and seven stars sprouted over some of the graves.
It’s my annual reminder that we still have Confederate Memorial Day, one of three state holidays honoring men who killed American soldiers in defense of white supremacy.
That’s what the Confederacy was about, and it’s never been a secret. Ulysses S. Grant wrote in his memoirs that the Southern cause was “one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”
He added that he did not question “the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.”
Neither do I. These men were honest in their racism like a vulture is straightforward about its plans for a dying animal.
Some may consider that impolite. Many believe that the South’s profound inhumanity was a kind of trick pulled off by elites. In this telling, the people at the top invented or extended racism to keep poor whites, whose griefs came from the enslavers and not the enslaved, distracted and unable to form potentially powerful class-based alliances. Gaslit into confusion, lower-class whites became the unthinking tools of the aristocrat pulling strings from a secure perch.
If this was the whole tale, Reconstruction would have been as challenging as a home remodeling project. Swap Slaveholder A for Public Servant B. Alabama’s myriad issues with education and public health — all of which have roots in slavery — would be far less dire.
The problem is that it treats racism as little more than a tool for rich whites and a fog around poor ones. With a little time and a bit of sunshine, the mists of hatred would evaporate and people would see the world clearly.
But nearly all whites, whether rich or poor, chose to drink from the same polluted well. The poison seeped into their blood and penetrated their bones. It left many white men convinced that their own roles leading their households depended on keeping Black Americans in bondage.
“The hidden assumptions and values that underlay their political choices were forged in the relationships that engaged them most directly,” the historian Stephanie McCurry wrote in “Masters of Small Worlds.” “With the few slaves they may have owned, but, just as importantly, with the women and other family dependents they presumed it their natural right to rule. Whether slaveholders or not, yeoman household heads were, as they proudly proclaimed, masters.”
Maybe the ordinary farmer didn’t like the slaveholder’s house or his allies shifting taxes to him. But when the rich man spoke of domination and order, he heard his own dark thoughts. He saw a peer.
And when those elites declared war on the federal government, he picked up a gun, grabbed starvation-level rations, and killed American soldiers. And he sang all the way.
The brackish water of racism freed him from any concern about his position or any desire for something better. In his mind, liberty grew from the chain on a Black American. That was worth a bullet or a fatal illness in a filthy tent.
Lewis Parsons, the governor of Alabama, estimated after the war that 122,000 Alabamians — more than a fifth of the prewar white population — took up arms for racism. Somewhere between 27,000 and 35,000 of them died for it. (Perhaps 3,000 white Alabamians fought for the Union, while 5,000 Black Alabamians took on the blue.)
Tens of thousands more were injured. God knows how much undiagnosed trauma went home to their families, their children, and future generations.
Given the choice, I would fire every single Confederate holiday into the sun. But if the state insists on having them, we may look at those men decaying beneath the Stars and Bars and reflect on where embracing authoritarianism leads.
Decades of family and children and love cleaved by hate and ended by a firearm, a shell, or a virus.
Lives reduced to a flag without a country and a cause no decent person honors.
A pointless sacrifice to the fickle god of malice.
Today we see many people surrounding the poisoned well that fed that destruction, pushing and shoving to get a taste.
Drink from it, and almost everything else falls away. The economy burns, and the rule of law dies, but they have a sense of peace. They smile as corruption thrives and their savings evaporate. Nothing matters except their rapturous vision of a person with brown skin suffering.
In that hateful daze, they nod as the administration locks people up without trial. While scholars are hounded. And as the bright future down a more difficult path fades away.
What comes of that? What does it leave behind?
A graveyard. A field of faded tombstones in dead soil, acidic from the hatred leaching out of the buried bones.
And on this sterile ground, the Confederate flags bloom.
This article was published by Alabama Reflector, which is part of States Newsroom, the nation’s largest state-focused nonprofit news organization.
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