Thursday, November 29, 2007
Civil War remembrance
John Long
Recent columns
From the RoundTable blog
How should the Civil War, and specifically the Confederacy, be remembered?
It's a question that comes up more frequently than you might think, given that the war ended nearly 15 decades ago. I've noted two unbending factions on the issue. One extreme: the "unreconstructed" enthusiasts who will hear no criticism of the Old South. The Boys in Gray fought valorously for a noble Lost Cause that had nothing to do with slavery, and only the fact that the victors write the history books keeps the truth submerged.
On the other extreme are those for whom no good must ever be spoken of the Confederacy. The war was about slavery alone, and thus the Southern side must only be excoriated with every breath or you must be a closet racist.
The question of Civil War remembrance is one about which I recently corresponded with two readers -- on opposite sides of the issue but neither in the extreme. One is not comfortable with public displays of anything Confederate; the other dons the persona of a Virginia infantry officer for re-enactments.
The dialogue started with Rob, a reader with whom I'd previously exchanged e-mails about Civil War commemoration. Rob read my recent column questioning college students who wear Che Guevara T-shirts without knowing who he was. Rob has two African-American sons, he wrote, who are faced daily with equally offensive Confederate flag T-shirts in their public school and asked if I had considered their point of view.
I confessed I hadn't, and asked Rob some leading questions, playing the devil's advocate on the issue. For instance, I asked what he would advise if one of his sons wore an American flag lapel pin to school and a classmate with Cherokee roots was offended -- his people had suffered injustices under that flag, after all.
Rob's response was commendably thoughtful. He fairly pointed out that the situation I described was hypothetical, whereas the Confederate T-shirts his sons encountered daily were real.
But if his son wore such a pin and it in fact offended someone, he would advise him to take it off.
Fair enough. There's much to be said for common courtesy.
I next contacted Greg, a friend who teaches middle school and participates in a Confederate re-enactment group. I asked Greg some argumentative questions as well. How would he, a teacher and a living historian, handle the situation if a black student approached him confidentially expressing discomfort with a classmate's Confederate T-shirt?
Greg replied that at his grade level, he often has to "diffuse issues rather than open windows of enlightenment." Nevertheless, he said he would handle such a situation differently depending on circumstances. If the white student was not wearing the T-shirt to be deliberately provocative, he would assume the role of a civics teacher and point out the related First Amendment rights.
But if he sensed there were some troubling racial tensions at play, he would sit the students down, with parents if necessary, and use the disagreement as a "teachable moment," discussing the historical issues and trying to get each to see the other's perspective. If the white student was being intentionally provocative or intimidating, he would deal with the matter as a discipline issue.
At the root of both of these hypothetical questions is an issue of symbolism. Is the meaning of a symbol such as a flag in the eyes of the beholder or the displayer? I'm not sure Rob, Greg and I found a definitive answer to this question. But I think we showed that a little understanding on both sides of these Civil War debates would go along way.
Die-hard Southerners would do well to acknowledge that slavery was an unavoidable issue in the war, and that Confederate symbols like the Stars and Bars were appropriated by anti-integrationists in the 1950s and used in hurtful ways.
Die-hard anti-southerners should recall that here in the South, the Confederacy is our history. Our ancestors fought in gray for a cause in which they believed.
William Faulkner famously said "the past is not dead -- it's not even past." As long as opposing factions insist on refighting a long ago conflict, usually for modern political reasons unrelated to the Civil War, this will always be the case.
Long, who teaches history at Roanoke College and is the director of the Salem Museum, is a Roanoke Times columnist.
