One hundred sixty-one years since the origin of what has become Memorial Day, the American public opinion on honoring Confederate fallen on Memorial Day is deeply divided, largely split along political, racial and regional lines.
Many in Sampson County, including the descendants of Confederate fallen soldiers, have allowed the Lost Cause narrative to impede racial progress by insisting that the Civil War was a just struggle, one that was more about states’ rights than about slavery. To that, I say, “Nonsense.” The centrality of slavery to the entire makeup of the South is crystal clear, with many poor Southern whites aspiring to become landowning slaveholders.
Everything was done to promote the “peculiar institution” of slavery to avoid losing a 2 billion dollar investment. Much of this Lost Cause myth has remained centered around the notion that enslaved people benefited from being enslaved, learning valuable life lessons and were largely loyal and content souls. To be certain, this myth prevents sincere and frank conversation to help create pathways toward reckoning with historical wrongs. And let me say to the descendants of any Confederate fallen, maybe it’s time to view the Civil War from a different eye.
Instead of accepting defeat at the conclusion of the Civil War, many Southern leaders and organizations set about finding ways to write a false narrative to mask the racist foundations, with the intention of keeping the Negro in his place. So, the history of the South that was put in place was totally inaccurate for the most part, based on the Confederate perspective. And today, when accurate history is presented to counter the myth, one gets accused of rewriting history. And that is far from the case. A lie kept in place long enough will soon be repeated as history. Fortunately, truth will eventually prevail.
While ignoring the demands of Black Americans and their white allies for equality, the Lost Cause myth persisted with the application of Jim Crow laws as the “natural” social order for Blacks in the South, with the North being complicit in such an outrage, giving its acceptance of Black inferiority. And pretty soon, the Old Confederate/New South was portraying its racist foundations of Southern institutions as “Southern heritage” rather than injustice, making it less likely to appear as systemic racism. And today, much of the resistance to change is simply an effort to protect white supremacy.
Just a few years ago, many in Sampson County were justifying the Confederate statue on the courthouse grounds as “Southern heritage,” professing it had nothing to do with an assertion of white dominance in public spaces and systemic racism. With the removal of the Confederate monument from its prominent public space in downtown Clinton and the current conversation concerning the May 25 Memorial Day service, could this not be the moment in our history for us to embrace as “an act of truth-telling and confession,” to nudge us to begin the process of reconciliation and healing?