just the obvious stuff on the confederate flag

South Carolina House approves bill removing Confederate flag

Associated Press

http://news.yahoo.com/confederate-flags-fate-hands-south-carolina-house-083453016.html#

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — The South Carolina House approved a bill removing the Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds, a stunning reversal in a state that was the first to leave the Union in 1860 and raised the flag again at its Statehouse more than 50 years ago to protest the civil rights movement.

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Alabama governor orders Confederate flags taken down

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/24/politics/alabama-governor-confederate-flags/

Washington (CNN)Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley has directed that four Confederate flags be taken down from a Confederate memorial at the state capitol.

Bentley’s order comes just two days after South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley asked state lawmakers to remove the flag from her state’s capitol, and amid a seismic shift on the question of whether the flag should fly on government property, in the wake of last week’s church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina.

Nikki Haley calls for removal of Confederate flag from capitol grounds

Bentley spokeswoman Yasamie August told CNN that the flags were taken down because Bentley did not want to distract from legislative issues. August said the move will be permanent, but no other discussions are underway about the Confederate memorial itself.

The Birmingham News reports that workers quietly removed the flags at 8:20 a.m. Wednesday and declined to answer questions. Bentley later told the paper that the flags had “the potential to become a major distraction” as state leaders work through the state budget and other issues.

South Carolina has been the nexus of attention for the revived debate over the Confederate flag. But other southern states are reviewing their flags and the use of Confederate symbols on other official state items.

Mississippi voters elected in 2001 to keep the Confederate “bars and stars” as part of their state flag, but state lawmakers are renewing a push to remove it from the flag. Bipartisan leaders in Tennessee are also reviewing their state flag and looking to remove a bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest, the former Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan leader, which sits outside the state Senate chamber

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Confederate flag debate sweeps South

http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/23/politics/confederate-flags-southern-states-debate-legislators/

Washington (CNN)State legislators across the South are now taking up the debate over the prominence of the Confederate flag in their states after conservative leaders displayed a sudden swell of support on Monday for removing the Confederate flag from the State House grounds in South Carolina.

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Nascar Chairman Wants Confederate Flag Eliminated at Races

http://www.wsj.com/articles/nascar-chairman-wants-confederate-flag-eliminated-at-races-1435438884

Calling the Confederate flag an “insensitive symbol” he personally finds offensive, Nascar Chairman Brian France said the series will be aggressive in dissociating the symbol from its events.

“We want to go as far as we can to eliminate the presence of that flag,” France said Saturday. “I personally find it an offensive symbol, so there is no daylight how we feel about it, and our sensitivity to others who feel the same way.

“Obviously, we have our roots in the South, there are events in the South, it’s part of our history like it is for the country. But it needs to be just that, part of our history. It isn’t part of our future.[/quote]

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Rebellion Against the Confederate Flag and the Cost of Flying It

1 Jul, 2015

http://www.sportsdestinations.com/destinations/south-carolina/rebellion-against-confederate-flag-and-cost-flying-9537#sthash.8bJjEBcZ.dpuf

The call for the symbolic gesture of lowering the confederate flag from the South Carolina capitol certainly has not gone unnoticed in the Palmetto State or anywhere else in the U.S. And the ripple effect is being felt all the way through the world of sports.

According to South Carolina football coach Steve Spurrier, who spoke out against the flag’s presence back in 2007.

“My opinion is we don’t need the Confederate flag at our capitol,” Spurrier said, according to The Associated Press. “I don’t really know anybody that wants it there, but I guess there are a lot of South Carolinians that do want it there.”

Spurrier had made the comments in response to a fan waving a Confederate flag during a 2006 game against Tennessee. The game was spoiled, Spurrier said, by “some clown waving that dang, damn Confederate flag behind the TV set. And it was embarrassing to me and I know embarrassing to our state.”

The NCAA instituted a policy in 2001 barring South Carolina and Mississippi from hosting many postseason events — most prominently, the men’s and women’s NCAA basketball tournaments — because both states still flew the Confederate flag. In the 2015 women’s NCAA Tournament, however, the NCAA went against that policy and allowed South Carolina to host opening-round games, a move that drew protests from the NAACP.

Bleacher Report noted the flag issue shows no sign of slowing down. Within the last two weeks, the Supreme Court ruled Texas could ban use of the Confederate flag on custom license plates. Lawyers for the Native Americans who filed a trademark lawsuit against the Washington Redskins cited that ruling Tuesday as they continue to work against the NFL franchise regaining the copyright, per an Associated Press report.

Philadelphia Eagles cornerback Byron Maxwell, who grew up in Charleston, was another of the athletes to speak out on how the situation affects him.

“I remember just about every car had the Confederate flag when I was young,” Maxwell told Robert Klemko of the MMQB.com. “It’s something they’re proud of. If those things are still flying, how far have we really come? They want to say, it’s not hate, it’s heritage. But hate is the most important part of that heritage.”

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From retail stores to state houses, more say Confederate flag must go

http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Society/2015/0623/From-retail-stores-to-state-houses-more-say-Confederate-flag-must-go-video

“There’s huge competition between states like Georgia and South Carolina, which want to be hospitable to a diverse group of people and want to be attractive to businesses, which is why they’re increasingly realizing that having some kind of state endorsement of the Confederate flag is not getting them where they need to be in those two areas,” says Gibbs Knotts, a political scientist at the College of Charleston.

“There’s huge competition between states like Georgia and South Carolina, which want to be hospitable to a diverse group of people and want to be attractive to businesses, which is why they’re increasingly realizing that having some kind of state endorsement of the Confederate flag is not getting them where they need to be in those two areas,” says Gibbs Knotts, a political scientist at the College of Charleston.

Several South Carolina chambers of commerce urged the legislature to take the flag down, saying in a statement: “Now is the time to do away with the things that divide us and prevent our state from moving forward,” the Greenville, S.C., Chamber of Commerce, which helps recruit corporations to the region, wrote in a statement on Monday.

Other Southern states are also weighing whether the battle flag might be more appropriate as a museum piece. Mississippi legislators this week have begun to push for a change to the state flag, which incorporates the battle flag as part of the design, and Virginia’s governor called for the removal of the Confederate battle flag from state license plates.

In South Carolina, 50 percent of residents – a historic low – want the flag to remain on the state capitol grounds, according to a poll conducted before the shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some Southerners are tired of clinging to the symbols of the past, historians say.

“There’s a huge majority of the people I’ve met, including people who were born here [in Mississippi] and grew up here, that are tired of the whole Confederate thing, and who don’t want to have anything to do with the flag or the Confederacy,” says Ole Miss economist Jon Moen in Oxford.[/quote]

A New Southern Heritage

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/06/after_obama_s_eulogy_to_clementa_pinckney_and_bree_newsome_taking_down_the.2.html

Midway through his eulogy for Rev. Clementa Pinckney, the slain pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama spoke on the Confederate flag, which still flew at the state Capitol in Columbia. “Removing the flag from this state’s Capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought—the cause of slavery—was wrong. The imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong,” he said. “It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history, a modest but meaningful balm for so many unhealed wounds.”

The next morning, on Saturday, Bree Newsome—a North Carolina–based artist and activist—scaled the flagpole outside the South Carolina Statehouse to remove the flag herself, in an outsized act of civil disobedience. She was arrested, but not before she made a national impression with the latest—and most dramatic—act against the Confederate flag.

Per Obama, the truth of the Confederate flag shift is that, after a century of this distorted remembrance, the South—and the country at large—is making an overdue correction. And although it comes out of tragedy—a racist allegedly killed nine black people with the flag as a backdrop to his hate—it also reflects the fact of the modern South, a growing, more cosmopolitan place, with vibrant cities, Latino immigration, Northern transplants, and a “reverse migration” of black Americans from around the country.

If the past is a place we construct—one that says as much about us as it does the people we remember—then this South isn’t erasing history; it’s working to build a more truthful narrative of the Civil War for a broader, more diverse generation of Southerners. And the push against Confederate flags is just the beginning. With a vast landscape of monuments and plantations, Southerners of all colors will have to place this constructed past in its honest context before they try to build a more usable history for themselves and their descendants.

It’s no surprise that, even as the dead had lain in wake, there was a backlash to the transformation. “It’s our own mini-French Revolution, expunging history in a frenzy of self-righteousness. Luckily, so far: 1st time tragedy, 2nd time farce,” wrote the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol on Twitter. “With all due deference to hatred for a Confederate flag on a pole at the statehouse, this seems like an almost childlike attempt to miss the seriousness of the situation,” wrote Mollie Hemingway at the Federalist, comparing anti-flag journalists to the Taliban militants who destroyed sixth-century Buddhist statues in 2001. And in an essay for National Review, Kevin Williamson blasted liberals for alleged hypocrisy: “It is strange and ironic that adherents of the Democratic party—which was, for about 140 years, not only the South’s but the world’s leading white-supremacist organization—should work themselves up over one flag, raised by their fellow partisans, at this late a date; but, well, welcome to the party.”

To call the backlash to the flag opportunism, though, is to miss the decades of anti-flag activism from ordinary Southerners that coalesced in the present moment. Each critic opposes the flag and wants it to come down. What they dislike is the perceived disdain and disrespect in the sudden push against Confederate paraphernalia, as well as a touch of the totalitarian—a drive to “purge” public memory of unhappy, inconvenient history. “We’re, in a way, blowing up parts of history,” said conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Wednesday. “[They’re] moving on from the flag to statues, memorials, perhaps Civil War re-enactments, until what else? What else becomes an untouchable or unshowable in our society?”

Underneath this hyperbole are real concerns, shared by those Southerners who see heritage, not hatred, in the Confederate battle flag. “This is an emotional time and we all need to think through these issues with a care that recognizes the need for change but also respects the complicated history of the Civil War,” wrote former Virginia senator and Democratic presidential hopeful Jim Webb in a call for nuance and understanding.

Webb, like Ingraham, Williamson, Hemingway, and Kristol, is right that Americans need nuance, that we shouldn’t ignore or erase history out of offense or discomfort. But they go wrong when they tie this notion of honest history to the Confederate battle flag.

Far from an authentic symbol of Southern heritage and ancestry, the flag is a propaganda coup, the end point of 150 years of myth-making. The same goes for the countless Confederate monuments that mark the Southern landscape, from equestrian statues of Robert E. Lee and mountain carvings of Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson, to highways named for Jefferson Davis and schools named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, father of the Ku Klux Klan. Each calls back to a pre- and post-war romanticism, where the Civil War was a gentlemen’s conflict of dueling ideals—autonomy versus central authority, agrarian democracy versus industrial capitalism—between brilliant, honorable Southerners and their determined, better-equipped opponents in the North.

The truth of the Confederate flag shift is that, after a century of this distorted remembrance, the South—and the country at large—is making an overdue correction.

But this story is a lie. Far from the peaceful society of a young Scarlett O’Hara, the antebellum South was a brutal archipelago of slave labor camps governed by an aristocracy of planters and slave traders. Those men fought the Civil War to preserve slavery and expand it in a vast empire of bondage. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” wrote the Mississippi secessionists. “The people of the slave holding States are bound together by the same necessity and determination to preserve African slavery,” echoed their counterparts in Louisiana.

Far from glorious, this war for slavery was savage. At the Battle of Fort Pillow in Tennessee, Confederate troops under Maj. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest massacred a surrendering Union force of free-born blacks and former slaves. Likewise, in Centralia, Missouri, Confederate guerrillas executed almost two-dozen Union soldiers after looting a passenger train. And during the Gettysburg campaign, the Army of Northern Virginia—led by Gen. Robert E. Lee—commenced a kidnapping campaign, raiding Pennsylvania towns, capturing free blacks, and sending them South into slavery.

After the war, however, former Confederate leaders would work to obscure the causes and the conduct of the war, building a new narrative of the conflict. Slavery, wrote Jefferson Davis in his defense of the Southern cause, “was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.” The South, instead, was fighting against the “unlimited, despotic power” of the federal government and its “tremendous and sweeping usurpation” of states’ rights. “It is a postulate, with many writers of this day, that the late War was the result of two opposing ideas, or principles, upon the subject of African Slavery. … Those who assume this postulate, and so theorize upon it, are but superficial observers,” wrote former Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, just three years after the war had ended and seven years after he gave his Cornerstone Speech defending slavery as the foundation of Southern life. “[T]he conflict,” he continued, “arose from different and opposing ideas as to the nature of what is known as the General Government.”

Concurrent with this whitewash of the causes of the war was a push to enshrine Confederate military leadership as the standard of Southern bravery and valor. Throughout the South, ex-Confederates built and erected monuments to Lee, to Forrest, and to Jackson. It’s here that Lee attains his still-high stature as a gentleman and military genius, despite his slave-holding, his defense of slavery, and a mixed generalship that failed to achieve Confederate war aims, even when odds were with him.

But it’s in the wake of Reconstruction and the white Southern victory over black and Northern political power, notes historian David Blight in Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, that these monuments became part of a narrative of restoration and victory, and an antecedent to today’s nostalgia:

At the October 1878 unveiling of the Confederate monument in the town square of Augusta, Georgia, one of that state’s most popular Lost Cause voices, Charles Colcock Jones Jr., argued that the South had fought for “liberty” and “freedom” and had lost only because it had been “overborne by superior numbers and weightier munitions.” Then he quickly shifted to a victory narrative. The ultimate verdict of the war awaited the history of their own time. “Nothing has been absolutely determined except the question of comparative strength,” said Jones. “The issue furnished only a physical solution of the moral, social, and political propositions.” To Jones, the South could still win the war politically. The “political privileges” and “vested rights” of Southerners, he declared, “are, in a moral point of view, unaffected by the result of the contest.”

This “Lost Cause,” Blight continues, “became an integral part of national reconciliation by dint of sheer sentimentalism, by political argument, and by recurrent celebrations and rituals.” By the 1890s, it formed the basis for national memory of the war, “a set of conservative traditions by which the entire country could gird itself against racial, political, and industrial disorder.” Expressed in academia by the work of pro-Southern historians like William Dunning and popularized by The Clansman, Gone With the Wind, and other successful novels, the Lost Cause became the foundation for Southern memory of the war years and their aftermath.

When white Southerners returned the battle flag to view in the 1950s and 1960s—in defense of Jim Crow and in defiance of the federal government—they did so against this backdrop of Confederate memory. “Today I have stood, where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people,” said Alabama Gov. George Wallace in his infamous 1963 inaugural address. “It is very appropriate then that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom as have our generations of forebears before us done, time and time again through history. Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us and send our answer to the tyranny that clanks its chains upon the South.”

The simple fact is the flag doesn’t have a different meaning. Its heritage is hate, and we can’t divorce it from Stephens or Wallace or any of the racists and terrorists it’s inspired. But we can place it in its proper context, as Southerners construct a more honest, and more inclusive, heritage. Luckily, this isn’t a new task. In places like Germany and the former Soviet bloc, artists, historians, and ordinary people have worked to place their recent past in context, as both a memorial to victims and as a reminder of local contributions to the uglier parts of human history. In addition to major installations like the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, there are also smaller projects; since 1997, one German artist has installed small cobblestone memorials in front of the last known residences of the Holocaust dead and other victims of Nazism.

By definition, these projects are contentious. In Eastern and Central Europe, the push to commemorate and memorialize the victims of Soviet communism has brought disputes around the scope and content of these efforts. To emphasize national resistance—the Hungarian revolution of 1956 for example—is also to look away from the people who collaborated or just tried to live their lives. And there’s also the question of what to do with communist-era monuments to the heroes of communist governments. Should those stand? Or should they be removed and brushed into the ash heap of history?

There’s no way to escape these questions or the broad challenge and heartache of crafting a new narrative—a new way for people to see and understand their history. At the same time, we don’t have to knock down Monument Avenue in Richmond or demolish Stone Mountain in Georgia to construct a more honest history of the South. The Whitney Plantation in Louisiana was transformed into a museum of slavery to illustrate the reality of the institution. Other plantations could follow suit, de-emphasizing the lives of the planters and emphasizing those of black Americans. After the Charleston shootings, a statue of John C. Calhoun—famous defender of slavery in the antebellum South—was marked with “racist” in spray paint. I understand the sentiment, but we don’t need vandalism to add context to Calhoun and emphasize his disgraced place in the hall of American politicians.

Beyond flags and statutes, we can work to resurrect and uncover a broader history of the South, to include moments—and people—we’ve forgotten. For instance, with the Equal Justice Initiative, Bryan Stevenson is illuminating our history of lynching, part of a larger project of researching—and marking—our sites of racial injustice.

There’s room for pride in Southern history too. Instead of Robert E. Lee, future Southerners might esteem Cassius Marcellus Clay, a onetime Kentucky slaveholder who embraced the abolitionist cause and became a fierce advocate against slavery, risking his fortune and his reputation for the sake of human freedom. Or they might learn more about Angelina and Sarah Grimke, two South Carolina sisters born into wealth and influence who turned their backs on their class to preach abolition. There’s men like Robert Smalls, the former slave who commandeered a Confederate vessel, rescued his family, escaped to freedom, and served as one of the first black Americans in the House of Representatives; George Henry Thomas, a Virginia-born general who, unlike Lee, fought for the Union; and James Longstreet, a Confederate general who, after the war, embraced Reconstruction and even led a black militia against an armed mob of white vigilantes.

Toward the end of his eulogy, President Obama quoted Clementa Pinckney on the South and its relationship to history:

Rev. Pinckney once said, “Across the South we have a deep appreciation of history. We haven’t always had a deep appreciation of each other’s history.” What is true in the South is true for America. Clem understood that justice grows out of recognition of ourselves in each other. That my liberty depends on you being free too. That history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. How to break the cycle. A roadway towards a better world.”

It will take hard work, struggle, and even acrimony to build a more inclusive heritage for the South. But as we’ve seen, and continue to see, it’s necessary and possible.

Why do people believe myths about the Confederacy? Because our textbooks and monuments are wrong.

False history makes us all dumber.

By James W. Loewen

James W. Loewen, Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Vermont, is the author of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” and “The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/07/01/why-do-people-believe-myths-about-the-confederacy-because-our-textbooks-and-monuments-are-wrong/

The Confederate flag waves over the South Carolina statehouse. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

History is the polemics of the victor, William F. Buckley once said. Not so in the United States, at least not regarding the Civil War. As soon as the Confederates laid down their arms, some picked up their pens and began to distort what they had done and why. The resulting mythology took hold of the nation a generation later and persists — which is why a presidential candidate can suggest, as Michele Bachmann did in 2011, that slavery was somehow pro-family and why the public, per the Pew Research Center, believes that the war was fought mainly over states’ rights.

The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant understanding of what the war was all about. We are still digging ourselves out from under the misinformation they spread, which has manifested in our public monuments and our history books.

Take Kentucky, where the legislature voted not to secede. Early in the war, Confederate Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston ventured through the western part of the state and found “no enthusiasm, as we imagined and hoped, but hostility.” Eventually, 90,000 Kentuckians would fight for the United States, while 35,000 fought for the Confederate States. Nevertheless, according to historian Thomas Clark, the state now has 72 Confederate monuments and only two Union ones.

Neo-Confederates also won parts of Maryland. In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) put a soldier on a pedestal at the Rockville courthouse. Maryland, which did not secede, sent 24,000 men to the Confederate armed forces, but it also sent 63,000 to the U.S. Army and Navy. Still, the UDC’s monument tells visitors to take the other side: “To our heroes of Montgomery Co. Maryland: That we through life may not forget to love the thin gray line.”

In fact, the thin gray line came through Montgomery and adjoining Frederick counties at least three times, en route to Antietam, Gettysburg and Washington. Robert E. Lee’s army expected to find recruits and help with food, clothing and information. It didn’t. Instead, Maryland residents greeted Union soldiers as liberators when they came through on the way to Antietam. Recognizing the residents of Frederick as hostile, Confederate cavalry leader Jubal Early ransomed $200,000 from them lest he burn their town, a sum equal to about $3 million today. But Frederick now boasts a Confederate memorial, and the manager of the town’s cemetery — filled with Union and Confederate dead — told me, “Very little is done on the Union side” around Memorial Day. “It’s mostly Confederate.”

The politics behind the Confederate flag controversy in South Carolina(1:37)
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley (R) announced she supports removing the Confederate flag from the state capitol grounds. Here’s what you need to know about the history of the flag in the state and what needs to happen to have it removed. (Jorge Ribas/The Washington Post)

Neo-Confederates didn’t just win the battle of public monuments. They managed to rename the war, calling it the War Between the States, a locution born after the conflict that was among the primary ways to refer to the war in the middle of the 20th century, after which it began to fade. Even “Jeopardy!” has used this language.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded over states’ rights. Yet when each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states’ rights. In its “Declaration of the Causes Which Impel the State of Texas to Secede From the Federal Union,” for example, the secession convention of Texas listed the states that had offended the delegates: “Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan and Iowa.” Governments there had exercised states’ rights by passing laws that interfered with the federal government’s attempts to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act. Some no longer let slave owners “transit” across their territory with slaves. “States’ rights” were what Texas was seceding against. Texas also made clear what it was seceding for — white supremacy:

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

Despite such statements, neo-Confederates erected monuments that flatly lied about the Confederate cause. For example, South Carolina’s monument at Gettysburg, dedicated in 1963, claims to explain why the state seceded: “Abiding faith in the sacredness of states rights provided their creed here.” This tells us nothing about 1863, when abiding opposition to states’ rights provided the Palmetto State’s creed. In 1963, however, its leaders did support states’ rights; politicians tried desperately that decade to keep the federal government from enforcing school desegregation and civil rights.

So thoroughly did this mythology take hold that our textbooks still stand history on its head and say secession was for, rather than against, states’ rights. Publishers mystify secession because they don’t want to offend Southern school districts and thereby lose sales. Consider this passage from “The American Journey,” probably the largest textbook ever foisted on middle school students and perhaps the best-selling U.S. history textbook:

The South Secedes

Lincoln and the Republicans had promised not to disturb slavery where it already existed. Nevertheless, many people in the South mistrusted the party, fearing that the Republican government would not protect Southern rights and liberties. On December 20, 1860, the South’s long-standing threat to leave the Union became a reality when South Carolina held a special convention and voted to secede.

The section reads as if slavery was not the reason for secession. Instead, the rationale is completely vague: White Southerners feared for their “rights and liberties.” On the next page, the authors are more precise: White Southerners claimed that since “the national government” had been derelict ” — by refusing to enforce the Fugitive Slave Act and by denying the Southern states equal rights in the territories — the states were justified in leaving the Union.”

“Journey” offers no evidence to support this claim. It cannot. No Southern state made any such charge against the federal government in any secession document I have ever seen. Abraham Lincoln’s predecessors, James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce, were part of the pro-Southern wing of the Democratic Party. For 10 years, the federal government had vigorously enforced the Fugitive Slave Act. Buchanan supported pro-slavery forces in Kansas even after his own minion, territorial governor and former Mississippi slave owner Robert Walker, ruled that they had won an election only by fraud. The seven states that seceded before Lincoln took office had no quarrel with “the national government.”

Teaching or implying that the Confederate states seceded for states’ rights is not accurate history. It is white, Confederate-apologist history. “Journey,” like other U.S. textbooks, needs to be de-Confederatized. So does the history test we give to immigrants who want to become U.S. citizens. Item No. 74 asks them to “name one problem that led to the Civil War.” It then gives three acceptable answers: slavery, economic reasons and states’ rights. (No other question on this 100-item test has more than one right answer.) If by “economic reasons” it means issues with tariffs and taxes, which most people infer, then two of its three “correct answers” are wrong.

The legacy of this thinking pervades Washington, too. The dean of the Washington National Cathedral has noted that some of its stained-glass windows memorialize Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. There’s a statue of Albert Pike, Confederate general and reputed leader of the Arkansas Ku Klux Klan, in Judiciary Square.

The Army runs Fort A.P. Hill, named for a Confederate general whose men killed African American soldiers after they surrendered; Fort Bragg, named for a general who was not only Confederate but also incompetent; and Fort Benning, named for a general who, after he helped get his home state of Georgia to secede, made the following argument to the Virginia legislature:

What was the reason that induced Georgia to take the step of secession? This reason may be summed up in one single proposition. It was a conviction . . . that a separation from the North was the only thing that could prevent the abolition of her slavery. . . . If things are allowed to go on as they are, it is certain that slavery is to be abolished. . . . By the time the North shall have attained the power, the black race will be in a large majority, and then we will have black governors, black legislatures, black juries, black everything. . . . The consequence will be that our men will be all exterminated or expelled to wander as vagabonds over a hostile Earth, and as for our women, their fate will be too horrible to contemplate even in fancy.

With our monuments lying about secession, our textbooks obfuscating what the Confederacy was about and our Army honoring Southern generals, no wonder so many Americans supported the Confederacy until recently. We can see the impact of Confederate symbols and thinking on Dylann Roof, accused of killing nine in a Charleston, S.C., church, but other examples abound. In his mugshot, Timothy McVeigh, who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995, wore a neo-Confederate T-shirt showing Abraham Lincoln and the words “Sic semper tyrannis.” When white students in Appleton, Wis. — a recovering “sundown town” that for decades had been all white on purpose — had issues with Mexican American students in 1999, they responded by wearing and waving Confederate flags, which they already had at home, at the ready.

Across the country, removing slavery from its central role in prompting the Civil War marginalizes African Americans and makes us all stupid. De-Confederatizing the United States won’t end white supremacy, but it will be a momentous step in that direction.