Southerners should let the ‘Lost Cause’ become history
Jenny Horne is a 42-year-old lawyer from Summerville, S.C., who happens to be a descendant of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. She is also a “conservative values” Republican state representative. During the debate Wednesday night over removing a Confederate flag from the Capitol grounds in Columbia, an issue that arose after the murders of nine people in a Charleston church last month, it appeared that House members might be about to pull away from the issue.
Taking down the flag had gotten strong support in the Senate, as the accused killer was photographed with the battle flag, a symbol of the old Confederacy for some history buffs and a definite symbol of hatred, slavery and murder to many others, including most African-Americans.
But the debate was reignited, ultimately in favor of the flag’s removal, once Horne rose to speak in the most powerful moment of her political career. Jefferson Davis would not have liked it.
Horne told her colleagues she was sick and tired of the stalling about removing “this symbol of hate” from the Capitol grounds. “If we amend this bill,” she said, “we are telling the people of Charleston we don’t care.” She cried angry tears as she referred to the widow and children of state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, the pastor who was among the nine people killed June 17 at Emanuel AME Church by a young gunman acquaintances have described as a racist.
“For the widow of Sen. Pinckney and his two young daughters,” Horne said, “(amending the bill) would be adding insult to injury, and I will not be a part of it!”
The House passed the bill, and the flag is down.
The national debate over the battle flag as a symbol isn’t over, and the dialogue, such as it is, may be expanding to the question: Should monuments to the Confederacy, common in Southern capitals, be another starting point for a dialogue on race and history as happened in South Carolina in the wake of tragedy?
It is a valid question, often dismissed by those who defend the monuments and the symbols as “history” and criticize those who disagree with them as wanting to “rewrite history” or bow to “political correctness” or to disrespect the fallen warriors whose descendants revere them still.
There is no rewriting to be done. The South was not a country in a glorious cause. It engaged in a war against the United States. To attempt to justify flags and monuments from that “Lost Cause” as “noble” historic symbols may at one time have found support among many Southerners, but as the debate in South Carolina demonstrated, more Southerners now recognize that such symbols, while they should not be forgotten, have little nobility attached to them in the eyes of many Americans.
The battle flag that once was viewed as a benign relic was at one point adopted by the Ku Klux Klan and has now, in the wake of the Charleston murders, been reinforced in the minds of many as a symbol of intense racial hatred. Jenny Horne spoke a truth with no borders.
It is not surprising, then, that graffiti is appearing on some of the monuments, and there are many, many monuments on Southern courthouse grounds and in town squares. A monument to the Confederate soldiers, “Silent Sam,” on the University of North Carolina campus, was painted with graffiti, now removed. A memorial in front of a Durham County administration building got similar treatment.
Individual states are where debates, one would hope productive debates, over monuments should take place, as happened in South Carolina. Such debates would not dishonor the Confederate dead, just as it does not dishonor them to consign the Confederate battle flags to display cases in halls of history. That is not suppression of free speech. It is a recognition of history. All of it. Of all the people.
This story was originally published July 12, 2015 at 4:00 PM with the headline "Southerners should let the ‘Lost Cause’ become history."