Thank you for your responses. I guess it is never too late when it comes to history. Sherree, the images you created by retelling the story of your grandfather and the movie house in Virginia will stay with me forever. I understand what you’ve written from stories my mother shared with me from Memphis, TN and my grandmother’s stories from Meridian, MS. The stories of land taken from my Cherokee and Choctaw ancestors and the life they led on the periphery of their communities is, as you say, part of the American story. There is so much more to say.

I have a couple of historical bombshells to drop. Kevin, I’ll email you before I present them as stories for your website. I have photos but since several historians have offered to buy these photos from me and I refused, I don’t know how to share them with our group and still preserve my right to them. I’ve been thinking for years that I would publish an article for one of the Civil War Journals but some how I haven’t gotten around to it. Of course, there are, I’m sure, those who know what I know, but so far I haven’t run across them.

Kevin, what a wonderful opportunity you offer to all of us to learn from each other and expand our knowledge of history. Thanks a bunch. Sherree, I’l be in touch.
Zunny

I still receive comments on this post via email, so I am one reader who has not moved on. Therefore, I would like to respond to Zunny’s comment, if I may.

Your observations about race relations in the South are very accurate, Zunny. I am in the process of a close reading of Victoria Bynum’s Free State of Jones, and highly recommend the book as a truly brilliant study that illustrates through the meticulous and precise examination of one southern community, a history that I believe was repeated throughout the South. Bynum’s analysis of Jones County, Mississippi explains my own personal history in the mountains of Virginia better than any history I have ever read or hope to read.

The South I knew and know is a complex land of extremes that include violence and beauty; racial tolerance and equality and total oppression of the races by white supremacists; and communities in which the color line was ignored and defied, juxtaposed with communities that included “whites only” adherents and enforcers. The American South is the place in which the American experience and American ideals of liberty came face to face with one another in an explosive and final way that defines the culture still, in my opinion. Your mother is right. When it comes to race relations in the South, there is no guessing involved. Either a southern white man or woman is for or against a man or woman of another race. There is no in between. The same holds true for the black community or Indigenous communities; black and Indigenous communities either accept white men and women or they don’t accept them. When the races do come together, however, the American dream of equality is achieved beyond even what our founding fathers of the nation that came to be called America, but that is still Grandmother Turtle Island to many, envisioned. That could be because we are all related, after all, as are all members of the human race, whether we want to accept that or not.

I went to Virginia recently before my trip to Rome. In my town, there is an old theatre that was built in the 1920s. The theatre was decorated with a “Mayan” theme. The Mayan symbols are interspersed with murals that depict the local history of the area. This style of decorating offers a very interesting atmosphere, to say the least.

The history of my family, (and the history of the black community in our area, of which my family is a part) is also intertwined with the history of this theatre. In the 1930s (I think) my grandfather (whose grandmother was Cherokee) came from North Carolina to the mountains of Virginia. Once there my grandfather became something of a local legend because he introduced our isolated mountain community to “moving picture shows” by showing at this theatre, “The Trail of the Lonesome Pine.”

My father, as a young boy, used to sit in the balcony of the theatre with the black community, as his father ran the projector. (The balcony was the designated Jim Crow section) I asked my father how he reconciled the fact that there was one section for whites and another section for blacks. He said that since he sat in the balcony and all of his friends were black, that he thought he was black, too, so no problem. He was in his section. Plus, he agreed with our local historian who is a black woman married to a white man: the balcony seats were the best seats in the house. ( I agree with this assessment, too, in this sense: the men and women who sat in the balcony seats were the men and women who held the moral ground) That is not to say, of course, that my father and the men and women of the black community did not understand the power structure. They understood it, and they understood it well, and they defied it, carrying that defiance into the civil rights era and beyond.

Anyway, to make a long story longer, my mother’s best friend, who is African American, used to sit in the balcony as well in the Jim Crow era. Recently, a young relative of mine performed in this theatre. Of course I called my mother’s friend and asked her to come to the performance. My mother’s friend said, yes, of course, she wouldn’t miss it. So, together, my mother’s friend and I sat in the front of the theatre to watch our “daughter” perform pieces by Strauss, Puccini, and Verdi (This young relative is daughter to an entire community: white, black, Cherokee and Mexican American, as her father is first generation from Mexico) It was a wonderful experience–a Southern experience–an American experience, at America’s finest.

Thanks, Kevin. Thanks, Zunny. Thanks all. Your love is returned, Zunny. I am not a Facebook member, so I cannot communicate that way. If you would like to correspond some, though, my email is the following: tannensherree@yahoo.com. Sherree

It’s never too late to comment on a post. Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts. You are indeed correct that racial distinctions were indeed complex and need to be taken into account when analyzing this complex issue.

A second thought: My mother was born in Memphis, TN. She always said that only an African American who was born in the south could understand how they and whites feel about each other. She would always say, “If a white man in the south really likes you, you’ll know it and he will defend you and protect you no matter what. Those who don’t will show it and you don’t have to guess the way you do in the north.” So, I noticed her feelings about whites through the years. There was a tenderness for those who showed kindness, fairness and compassion. She had many white friends at work and they often came over to our home. When she remarried, she married a white man from Pound, W. Virginia. If you squinted, you missed Pound.

Here’a my last contribution: There were many “whites” who were fair-skinned blacks passing for white. No doubt about it. Who would have known. Many of those passing signed up to fight on the Confederate side to further keep guessing minds from their suspicious thoughts. There were many children born to white mothers by black fathers and of course there were black women who bore children by white masters, white overseers, whites who traveled from plantation to plantation doing odd speciality jobs and others who found a black woman at their disposal. We can’t forget this because if the few who fit this criteria are factored into the the mix we have a different view of just who some of the “white” Confederates might have been.

I apologize again for chimming in so late in the discussion.
Love you all,
Zunny

Greg,

That is the whole point. The argument just becomes absurd. That is because the history has been lost. Thus, any history can be presented as truth, until someone refutes the false history with facts.

Kevin, you state the following in another post: “I actually believe that there is an incredibly interesting story to be told about the presence of black southerners in the Confederate army. Unfortunately, it’s not the overly simplistic one that the SCV and others are currently pushing. Often times the past does not conform to our own needs.” I agree with that statement. I also think that a direct line can be drawn from the slave who is caricatured in the newspaper article that Peter Carmichael features in his essay, Neptune King, and HK Edgerton. Either Mr. Edgerton is totally calculating and has an agenda of his own that is beyond my comprehension, or he has adopted as his persona a caricature of himself. My point is that if we ridicule him, we are becoming part of the problem, not part of the solution.

“Randall Burbage, commander of the South Carolina Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said Confederate heritage is something that cannot be bought or earned, but instead has been inherited through birthright.”

Could someone please tell me when African-Americans were extended the Confederate heritage “birthright” by white decendants of Confederates? As I understand it, a “birthright” is something that has been handed down because of one’s birth, but at some point, because of the nature of the relationships between black Southerners and white Southerners, it had to have been given by their descendants because I believe former Confederates themselves would not have recognized African-Americans as having a Confederate “birthright.”

Make sure you include a name at the top of your comment if you are responding to another commenter. I sometimes blockquote those passages that I feel a need to respond to.

Thank you for responding, and my apologies for misunderstanding you. I keep saying that we all need to remain unemotional in these discussions, but I cannot follow my own advice. When we speak of these issues, I am thinking of the descendants of the black men and women in my area who became much more than mere acquaintances, but family, as I have discussed before, and the depth of the tragedy is so great that I really cannot express it. My father’s best friend never broke free of the chains of the legacy of slavery. He and my father were friends for decades. When this man (whom I loved too) died, there was a problem with the undertaker because of his race, and my father went truly bezerk (spelling?) and knocked a string of bottles off of the dining room table, and then started to go to the funeral home so that he could knock out the undertaker, but was stopped by some of his friends. We are plumbing some very deep waters here. None of us know what it means to be a black man or woman unless we are black. HK Edgerton knows, and he has taken a position that I quite simply cannot understand, but that I want to understand for the sake of the grandchildren of the same man I just talked about.

As far as the emancipationist view gone wild–I am not talking about any scholarly work. I am talking about what I perceive to be a pervasive attitude in our culture in which some Northerners seem to co-opt African American history as their own. Obviously I would have made a terrible history major, since that is an assumption that I cannot prove. Good thing I majored in English.

Have a good day, Marc, and thank you again.

best,
Marc

I think this comment was addressed to me, so I will clarify my point, Kevin, with your continued patience for this marathon thread.

First, I am not pushing the idea that black men who were slaves willingly joined the Confederate Army so that they could fight to remain slaves. In fact, I have consistently advocated just the opposite, and find that position ludicrous. There were black men who were slaves and who were forced to be laborers and camp servants in the Confederate Army, however. I think everyone agrees on that point. How are those men to be remembered and honored? Where do they fit in the modern narrative of the history of the Civil War that has its heroic themes in spite of all claims that it does not? They didn’t break away to freedom. They didn’t rise up and kill their masters. They didn’t write slave narratives. They were just born in slavery, lived their lives as slaves, were forced to fight for the army that was determined to keep them in slavery, and died as slaves. Where are these men honored in our national narrative? In fact, where is the southern black man honored as a man in white society at all prior to the civil rights era? Increasingly, I am beginning to believe that this debate has nothing to do with black men and women at all, but with preserving the sense of identity of the white population. It seems that, in order to maintain the national narrative, there is a need to demonize the white Southerner and patronize the black Southerner, other than black Southerners of the civil rights era and truly heroic scholars like John Hope Franklin. Since I just got categorically tossed into the Lost Cause crowd, more or less, it might be time for those who study others to study themselves. I am trying to understand why Mr. Edgerton, who was a leader in the NAACP, has taken the stand he has taken. I cannot fathom his reasons, and I wish he would tell us why, so that maybe we can understand. He is right at the center of an incredible, unsolvable paradox, and that may seem foolish to some, but it is not foolish to the men and women who have lived the history you are discussing. Also, I wish that there were a larger number of African American contributors to this discussion. I am again struck by Henry Louis Gates comment that the African American men and women at the SCV meeting were simply honoring their ancestors. Gates was not endorsing the SCV. Neither am I. In my view, Gates was honoring the right of the black men and women at the meeting to choose what they want to do. The modern black men and women at the SCV meeting are obviously not slaves, but free agents, and they are capable of making their own decisions. If they want to go to a SCV meeting; they can go. And they should not be chastised by white men and women for doing so. If the black community has something to say about it–fine. It is not the business of the white community. Now, this is a fascinating turn of events in this discussion. I have been a lifelong opponent of the SCV, and a person who has advocated, and still advocates, that the Confederate flag be retired, and who has fought all of my life for the equality of others, as has my family, and I find myself in the position of having to defend myself. This generation is not the first generation of multi-culturalists. We have been around for a long time. We just didn’t call ourselves multi-culturalists. I am back to my major point. Why are some African American men and women attending SCV meetings? Could it be that they have nowhere else to go? This story is not about white men and women. It is about black men and women. The SCV seems to have decided to co-opt African American history and reshape it into a parody of the Lost Cause myth. Those who go too far with the emancipationist view are co-opting African American history, too, and assuming a stance of moral superiority that belongs to black men and women alone in our national narrative. Then, there are historians, who, when presented with all of the facts, and disciplined by their profession, present a narrative that is as accurate as possible. All of these points of view are needed. But for the everyday person, there is still the need for a dream. And the everyday person will continue to dream. And sometimes those dreams become reality, as in the election of an African American man as President of the United States. We all participated in making that dream come true–including the black men who were slaves forced to be camp servants in the Confederate Army, and who died as slaves.

1. Neither the British or American armies were attempting emancipation or fighting preserve slavery. The mythic black confederate soldier actually fights to keep himself, and his family enslaved, to protect and perpetuate a system that oppresses him.

2. Black men who joined the Continental army did so with the promise of freedom at the end of the road. Black soldiers expected personal freedom, if not an end to slavery as an institution, although as noted above, slavery would be gradually eliminated in several states after the Revolution. The imagined black confederate soldier doesn’t even get that.

3. At some point we all have to accept that Santa Claus doesn’t exist, the world is round, evolution is real and the Holocaust occured. It’s fun to bat this around, but fundamentally it’s not serious.