Confederate "Heritage" Month 2019, April 12: New resource on Confederate history

The SPLC has created a new online information source to assist in a realistic look at Confederate history in the US, SPLC launches digital initiative to promote honest discussion of Confederate history 04/09/2019.

It includes a reminder that Confederate "Heritage" Month is unfortunately still officially celebrated:

Multiple Southern states proudly devote public time, energy and resources to celebrate the Confederacy each year. North Carolina and South Carolina celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on May 10. Kentucky, Louisiana and Tennessee celebrate it on June 3. Texas celebrates on Jan. 19, while Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi and – recently – Livingston, Tennessee, dedicate all of April to “Confederate History Month.” Alabama, Georgia, Florida and Mississippi also celebrate “Confederate Memorial Day” on various dates in April. [my emphasis]

The SPLC has been giving a lot of attention to the fight over Confederate monuments, discussed in this report, Whose Heritage? Public Symbols of the Confederacy 02/01/2019.

The report recalls how a racist mass murder provided new intensity to the debate over Lost Cause public monuments, which actively continues four years later, "The 2015 massacre of nine African Americans at the historic 'Mother Emanuel' church in Charleston, South Carolina, sparked a nationwide movement to remove Confederate monuments, flags and other symbols from the public square, and to rename schools, parks, roads and other public works that pay homage to the Confederacy."

The defenders of monuments promoting a Lost Cause version of history that celebrates treason in in defense of slavery include a number of very fine people dubious characters:

White supremacists have also taken up the cause, staging hundreds of rallies across the country to protest monument removals. We saw a dramatic display of their anger in August 2017 when hundreds of racists marched with torches and shouted Nazi slogans in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a young, anti-racist counterprotester was killed.

President Donald Trump has sided with those who want to continue honoring the Confederacy, calling the removal of “beautiful” monuments “foolish” and tweeting that it is “[s]ad to see the history and culture of our great country being ripped apart.”

The Lost Cause monuments provide a continuing example of the way that current political priorities and historical understandings and historical symbolism can be intricately connected:

There is no doubt among reputable historians that the Confederacy was established upon the premise of white supremacy and that the South fought the Civil War to preserve its slave labor. Its founding documents and its leaders were clear. “Our new government is founded upon … the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition,” declared Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens in his 1861 “Cornerstone speech.”

It’s also beyond question that the Confederate flag was used extensively by the Ku Klux Klan as it waged a campaign of terror against African Americans during the civil rights movement and that segregationists in positions of power raised it in defense of Jim Crow. George Wallace, Alabama’s governor, unfurled the flag above the state Capitol in 1963 shortly after vowing “segregation forever.” In many other cases, schools, parks and streets were named for Confederate icons during the era of white resistance to equality. [my emphasis]