Confederate Heritage Month 2021, April 12: Gov. Tater Tot declares Confederate Heritage Month in Mississippi

I guess it's a good sign that if the Mississippi governor wants to declare Confederate Heritage Month in his state, he feels the need to do it in the bureaucratic equivalent of spray-painting it on a wall in the middle of the night.

Donna Ladd reports (‘Darn’ Tootin’ It Is!’: Gov. Tate Reeves Again Declares Confederate Heritage Month, SCV Says Mississippi Free Press 04/12/2021):

Despite asking Gov. Tate Reeves’ office since late March if he planned to again declare April as Confederate Heritage Month with no response, this publication just found what appears to be this year’s proclamation. The new document, which Reeves apparently signed on April 7, 2021, appears on the Sons of Confederate Veterans’ Camp 265 Rankin Rough & Ready’s Facebook page. Reeves is from Rankin County.

The proclamation does not yet appear on the secretary of state’s official proclamations page at press time. The most recent one on the page is dated March 29, 2021.

This writer found last year’s proclamation on a Sons of Confederate Veterans Facebook page rather than through official government channels as well, breaking the news at the Jackson Free Press. In 2016, that publication had broken the news that Gov. Phil Bryant had quietly proclaimed Confederate Heritage Month, a long-time tradition by Mississippi governors, Democratic and Republican, that had flown under the media radar for years.

Ladd also describes some of the recent propaganda coming from the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SVC), one of the groups that glorifies slavery and white supremacy and violent treason in defense of them. Ladd notes that they run the private Beauvoir site, which was the coastal home of Confederate President Jefferson Davis. It is currently "a museum that has long sold revisionist books about the Confederacy, as well as received state funds ...."

Confederate "Heritage" Month 2021, April 3: Yes, Confederate monuments are about politics and white racism

For today's entry, I want to call attention to this piece by Brian Palmer and Seth Freed Essler, The Costs of the Confederacy Smithsonian Magazine Dec 2018:

To address [the issue of Confederate monuments] issue in a new way, we spent months investigating the history and financing of Confederate monuments and sites. Our findings directly contradict the most common justifications for continuing to preserve and sustain these memorials.

First, far from simply being markers of historic events and people, as proponents argue, these memorials were created and funded by Jim Crow governments to pay homage to a slave-owning society and to serve as blunt assertions of dominance over African-Americans.

Second, contrary to the claim that today’s objections to the monuments are merely the product of contemporary political correctness, they were actively opposed at the time, often by African-Americans, as instruments of white power.

Finally, Confederate monuments aren’t just heirlooms, the artifacts of a bygone era. Instead, American taxpayers are still heavily investing in these tributes today. We have found that, over the past ten years, taxpayers have directed at least $40 million to Confederate monuments—statues, homes, parks, museums, libraries and cemeteries—and to Confederate heritage organizations. [my emphasis]

The article discussing the Beauvoir memorial site in Biloxi, Mississippi, a site paying tribute to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America.

The last visit I made to Beauvoir was probably around 1980. At any rate before digital cameras were common, and long before iPhones. My father took a photo of me there, and I was wearing a blue shirt that day. When I had the picture developed, the shirt came out gray.

That was creepy. (Blue, of course, was the color of the Union uniforms, gray the color of the Confederates.)