JAOARM@aol.com wrote:To: RaceSlave@yahoogroups.com From: JAOARM@aol.com Date: Wed, 24 Aug 2005 07:32:40 EDT Subject: [RaceSlave] Well stated From: Dan Rolph <DRolph@HSP.ORG> Subject: Dixie, Heritage & Confederate monuments Back in 1979, Black writer J.K. Obatala, in a Smithsonian article entitled, "The unlikely story of blacks who were loyal to Dixie," also warned African-Americans (including at the time 'National Urban League' director Vernon Jordan & public official Andrew Young), that "educated" Black families "with deep roots in the South, may conjure up to us the ghosts of martyred Union soldiers and runaway slaves. But in fact their historical ancestors might just have worn the butternut of the Old South rather than the blue of the Union Army." Many recent publications such as Ervin L. Jordan, Jr's, Black Confederates & Afro-Yankees has aptly demonstrated this point for Virginia for example. Perhaps some of those African-Americans who are currently 'offended' by 'Dixie Days,' would not be, if they traced their family history in detail. In fact, as is well known by now, there is no 'monolithic' Black or White community. Just as there are White Southernors who are proud of their 'Unionist' leanings or service during the Civil War, we also have many African-Americans who are proud of their 'Confederate' heritage or ancestry, be it Black or White, such as Bob Harrison, who serves as a re-enactor with the 37th Texas Cavalry, or Nelson W. Winbush of Ripley, Tennessee, who proudly displays a Confederate flag, whose grandfather served under Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest. There's also Lillie Harding Vertrees Odom, an African-American living in Gallatin, Tennessee, one of the last 'living daughters' of the Confederacy and a member of the UDC, who earlier this year turned 90 years of age, daughter of a white Kentucky Confederate soldier. As she wisely stated in an interview, "The white Vertrees never tried to hide my father and who he was and we didn't hide who we were. We were all tied by something that happened before we were born and nobody could change it, so why hide it?" When confronted by her African-American friends about being a member of the UDC, and asked why she would associate herself with a period, "when most blacks were chattel, without rights," Lillie replied: "I was raised to care about others whether they were black or white. That's not happening now. Folks don't realize you've go to have love in your heart. You've got to have it if you want to be happy in the end. I don't want to sit with the devil..." African-American H.K. Edgerton of Asheville, North Carolina, a strong supporter of the Confederate flag understands what Lillie Odom means, as do popular Black writers such as Walter E. Williams and Thomas Sowell. Former slave George L. Knox, considered to be the most prominent Black citizen in Indiana after the Civil War, understood this as well, as witnessed in his autobiography, Slave and Freeman. Perhaps however, the person who understood it most, was famed African-American, Booker Taliaferro Washington, a former Virginia slave and later educator of the Tuskegee Institute of Alabama. Recently Mike B., gave an example from the popular work, Confederates in the Attic, relative to a Black Southern pastor's opposition to Confederate monuments in his town, as symbols of oppression or racism. However, Booker T. Washington, on November 10, 1904, in a letter to Atlanta banker, E. H. Thornton, treasurer of the 'Gen. John B. Gordon Monument Fund,' stated: "Enclosed I send you my check for twenty-five dollars as a small subscription towards the erection of the monument in memory of the late Gen. John B. Gordon. Just before he died he visited the Tuskegee Institute and spoke in our chapel to our students and teachers, together with a large number of white and colored citizens...his instructive, tender and sympathetic words will remain for a long time one of the most precious memories of this institution. I am led to make this contribution further because General Gordon represented in a most perfect degree the cultivated, brave and unselfish Southern man who was not only interested in the white race but in the elevation of my own people. He was indeed a true type of the connecting link between the best class of Southern white people and the truest type of my own race, and I believe that in the future there will be many to emulate his example." (See, 'The Booker T. Washington Papers, Vol.8, p.128, The University of Illinois! Press., 1979, 2000). Lets hope all of us, can live up to Lillie Odom and Booker T. Washington's dream, and be proud of our 'heritage' and 'history,' and at least have respect for one another's views; a discourse hopefully based upon fact, rather than emotions derived from half-truths or misrepresentations, generated by a 'politically' motivated media or academia, as is regrettably, often the case. Daniel N. Rolph, PhD Other than slavery, Fascism and Nazism war has not solved any problems. O'Neal and Others Family Heritage Page Arleigh Birchler, MDiv, BSN 1718 Fisher St #2 Madison WI 53713 608-251-4437 (Ali Sengaree - Allah'ka cli here chaya) Brams Addition Life&Choice Musick/Porter Fan Club Pleasure, Pain, Power, and Love