Who is Whitewashing History?

At Tuesday’s Manatee County Commission meeting, board members revisited the idea of where to locate a confederate flag-adorned monument that once stood on the grounds of the county courthouse. Things got as ugly and uninformed as you might imagine.

I have to admit that this issue makes my neck stiff and and my head ache whenever I see it on an agenda. It never comes up without the accompaniment of a cadre of zealous pro-Confederacy residents who rant and rave about succumbing toangry leftist mobs, while pontificating ignorantly on the invalidity of each reason one may have taken offense to the monument's former placement. It also showcases how little many of the board members seem to know about our history or the issue at hand.

I wrote a column when the issue first arose that goes into great detail–factual detail–as to how the origins and intent of this and other such monuments were being misrepresented by elected officials and Confederate monument supporters. It can be readhere.

I’ll note again that what is referred to as the Confederate Flag is not the actual flag of the Confederacy, but rather a battle flag of General Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. Much later, but before the monument’s dedication, it was co-opted by the Ku Klux Klan and flown during ceremonies and lynchings alike. It gained popularity during the height of the Jim Crow era when the Klan was at its peak, and it enjoyed a resurgence during the Civil Rights era when it was proudly waived by those whostilldidn’t think we should all be treated equally, regardless of our skin color, a full century after emancipation.

People can say whatever they want about the battle flag of a Virginia militia from over 150 years ago and what it means tothem, but once something becomes totally ubiquitous with a hateful movement of such magnitude, such distinctions become moot. Trying to whitewash the history of the flag in our culture is no less ridiculous than trying to argue that the other historical uses of the n-word or the swastika are justifications for bringing them into the public square and asking those who they would understandably offend to just grin and bear their celebration.

Our county’s monument, like nearly every other from the era, was not put up immediately after the war but rather as part of a movement by a pro-Klan group decades later to whitewash history and frame the war and its participants as something much nobler than people who had participated in an unsuccessful armed uprising against our country. It is therefore quite ironic to hear people refer to the act of removing it from the public square a century later as an attempt towhitewashhistory.

Nevermind whether individual soldiers owned slaves. You didn't have to own slaves to support slavery or benefit from a sytstem in which they were owned. Any attempt to say that the war wasn’t about slavery defies the very words of John C. McGehee, the elected president of Florida's secession convention, who made it clear that it was indeed. As for state's rights and property, so be it, so long as we're talking about the states' rights to have slavery and own humans as property.

In McGehee's own words,"At the South and with our people, of course, slavery is the element of all value, and a destruction of that destroys all that is property. This party, now soon to take possession of the powers of government, is sectional, irresponsible to us, and, driven on by an infuriated, fanatical madness that defies all opposition, must inevitably destroy every vestige of right growing out of property in slaves."

I’m sure there were Nazi soldiers who didn’t share all of Hitler’s beliefs, were ignorant to them, or didn’t necessarily think Jews needed to be exterminated. Wars have long been fought primarily by the young, poor and uninformed for the benefit of the wealthy and empowered. That said, I still don’t see Germany putting up monuments with swastikas and praise of Nazi leaders to honor the fallen of World War II. If Manatee County feels it necessary to somehow commemorate the lives lost and blood spilled on both sides, put up a new monument that says just that, sans all of the other baggage.

It’s a part of our history, we hear each time the debate is raised.What’s next?The answer? Whatever other antiquated symbol of hate and divisiveness we finally grow to abhor.No one minded for so long, we’re often told. Is that a status quo we should be proud of, or one we should be moving away from as fast as our feet will carry us?

As for the silly argument that keeping the monument in public sight will helpremind usof the awful thing that happened so that we remember and understand the horrible war, Tuesday’s meeting was proof positive that despite it having been there for nearly a hundred years, that approach has failed miserably.

As for thehonor the veterans argument, I’m a vet myself and were I ever to die participating in an unsuccessful armed uprising against my country, I would not expect the winning side to commemorate my loss, nor would I expect to be comforted by such efforts from six feet under the ground. Monuments are not nearly as effective athonoringandcommemoratingevents as they are at symbolizing ideas, and the ideas the Confederate Flag have come to symbolize in our culture are simply not ones we should be celebrating.

Finally, members of both the public and the board tried to whitewash history once more by asserting again at Tuesday’s meeting that the objections to the monument were manufactured, that the protestors who led to its removal were all outsiders who’d been bussed in as part of aradical leftist agenda. I covered the protest, personally, boots on the ground. There were no busses in the march’s staging area, and everyone I interviewed was from either Manatee or Sarasota counties, save two young girls who’d come down from St. Pete–in their Honda, not on a bus. Like it or not,hundredsof local citizens made themselves heard.

Was there a handful of rabble-rousers onbothsides who showed up on their own accord to start trouble? Yes, but no mention was made by those same voices on Tuesday about the radical right-wing protestors from outside our area who came to the protest to start trouble, some of whom were involved with the Unite the Right demonstration in Charlottesville, which happened shortly before. Local police evenarrested one of them, a man named Gary Snow, who had a long history of coming to political protests looking for trouble. I guess some people defineoutsidersideologically rather than geographically.

Many of the monument’s supporters want a referendum on relocating it back to the grounds of the courthouse where the many Manatee residents who are descendants of slaves would once more have to pass the not so subtle reminder that this is still the South on their way to do public business in an institution that is supposed to be blind to race, color and creed.

For those who claim no one cared before recently, it seems more than a tad presumptuous to assume that such residents were fine with the symbol being there just because they hadn't organized in protest of it. Perhaps it broke their heart every time they walked by, but they just figured, Hey, this is Manatee County, what do you expect?Maybe, like so many other residents, they had no idea it was there until it was pointed out. Does that make it any less offensive? Should they have just pretended at that point that they didn't know it was displayed on the public square?

Many of the protesters were young and some supporters of the monument have attacked their youth as a source of ignorance. They might consider instead that while previous generations of African Americans in Manatee County–having lived through the Civil Rights era and our county's notoriously slow and reluctant acceptance of integrated schools–thought it best to just let such things slide, this is simply the one that has saidenoughand demanded a more equitable appreciation of how all citizens are affected by such symbols, not just the most historically-empowered class and race.

Would more than half of voters be fine with the monument being returned to the courthouse? Quite possibly. But that doesn't make it right. Avoiding mob rule is one of the reasons we don’t have a direct democracy. I for one shudder to think of what horrors we’d face if a simple majority of any community could decide everything. Our so-called leaders are supposed toleadus away from our worst inclinations and toward our better angels. This is an opportunity to do so.

Casting aside relics such as this does nothing in terms of erasing history. History lives in books, documents, films, photos, and other first-hand accounts–not in monuments, the function of which is to commemorate rather than educate. Of the presented options on Tuesday, I liked the idea of conveying it to a private landowner best. Quite frankly, however, I’d rather see it pounded into dust and blown out to sea as the ashes of ideas that we have progressed far beyond a century later.