September 10. 2018
MY CORNER by Boyd
Cathey
Four Fascinating
Articles on the Monuments Question
And How We Memorialize
Our History: Yoder, Washington & Lee, Samantha Willis, and Violence
Advocates “Redneck Revolt”
Friends,
[Given the fact that a powerful
hurricane…Florence…is aiming its fury this way and that may mean the loss of
power, flooding, wind damage, and other possible affects, today’s installment
of MY CORNER may be the best last one until the situation hereabouts settles
down. I am not certain when that will be, but I ask your patience, your
understanding, and your prayers. As soon
as feasible, the column will reappear. Boyd D. Cathey]
Today let
me pass on four items (and excerpts of items) of interest which relate to the
ongoing frenzied efforts to remove, topple, and/or bring down the monuments
honoring Confederate veterans and Southern heritage. It should be evident to
all those temporizing and cowardly politicians (who are deathly afraid of being
labeled a “racist,” a “white supremacist,” or a “fascist”) that the targets of
wrath are not just Confederate
symbolism, but any and all symbols of what remains of our Western Christian and
European culture. And that the fanatical social justice warriors—those
unleashed lunatics—apparently will stop at nothing in their revolutionary mania.
During
the events relating to the toppling of “Silent Same” on the campus of the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, a number of prominent writers offered
contrasting views. I have previously passed on essays by Professor James “Bud”
Robertson and journalist Rod Christensen.
This morning the first item I send on is by Pulitzer Prize-winning
author Edwin Yoder. It’s short, but to the point and raises profound questions
about historical memory and how we view our history, indeed, all our history.
The
second item is a “Message from the President” of Washington & Lee
University, declaring that a specially-appointed commission that he had
appointed had, against the intense pressure of social justice warriors, decided
to retain the name of the institution, “Washington & Lee University,” and names
for the Lee Chapel and Lee House. Nevertheless, even this small victory for
history and heritage will probably see an additional push for “interpretation”
in the near future.
Then
follows portions of an article by black writer, Samantha Willis, in the large
circulation “women’s magazine,” Glamour,
enunciating what many of us already knew: it is those awful and oppressive
white males, those defenders of Western civilization, that is, “hate,” racism,
and male oppression—it is all of their monuments and symbols that must be ground into dust
or locked away in remote museums.
Lastly,
some short excerpts from a site titled “Redneck Revolt,” a revolutionary
Leftist group claiming to represent “poor people and oppressed communities,”
but in fact, is organized by academics (including by a key supporter of radical
violent action, Dwayne Dixon, Professor
of Cultural Anthropology at the University of North Carolina, see: https://bigleaguepolitics.com/silent-sam-destroyers-identified-as-the-antifa-leaders-from-charlottesville/ ).
“Redneck Revolt” advocates open
violence, trains its members in the use of high-powered firearms and
the use of bombs and projectiles, which it intends to use. [See the
descriptive photographs of its members armed with weapons on its Web site, at: https://www.redneckrevolt.org/principles] It has
been very active both in Durham and Chapel Hill, and no doubt had a presence in
provoking what occurred a year ago in Charlottesville. If anything, it is more violent
and dangerous than the other radical cultural Marxist groups—the Communist
Workers World Party, Antifa, and Black Lives Matter—and cooperates in tandem
with them.
Here is
the Yoder column:
=================================
Raleigh News & Observer
Silent Sam is gone. I didn’t expect to feel like this.
BY
EDWIN M. YODER JR.
August 23, 2018 12:32 PM
Updated August
23, 2018 12:32 PM
Among the pictures on our living room
wall hangs the framed photograph of an imposing obelisk in the square of a
small Georgia town. It memorializes a great-grandfather who gave the land on
which the village stands, and who, at the outbreak of Civil War, organized a
fighting company and took it northward to join Gen. Robert E. Lee’s great Army
of Northern Virginia. He claimed to resist “an unconstitutional invasion of my
homeland.” There is no mention of slavery. He died in battle on the James River
in August 1864.
A family tradition has it that a
detachment of Union Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s soldiers,
marching across Georgia in the last year of that conflict, trooped down the
breezeway of his desolate plantation house as my great-grandmother and their
children sat at dinner, but inflicted no damage. I have often wondered if this
forbearance was a gesture of chivalry to a fallen foe.
When I spoke of this Georgia ancestor
and his times in a lecture at the Virginia Historical Society some years back,
I cautioned that so far as I could tell, “the gist has little to do with racial
pride [or] ... accord with the Confederate cause as it would have been
understood ... For a remote descendant the satisfaction ... lies in a sense of
rootedness ... a continuity with the history of a nation so largely shaped by
conflict.” It will be understood, then, that when I spoke recently in defense
of Silent Sam at the Chapel Hill public library and was challenged by a
fiery-eyed listener who demanded, “Aren’t you ashamed of your views?” my answer
was “No, not in the least.”
Yet such ancestral scenes may explain
my unusually intense reaction to the desecration of Silent Sam. Silent Sam had
seemed doomed in recent months as UNC administrators and trustees and the
police dithered while the statue was vandalized. Still, it was hard to imagine
that this fine work of sculptural art and memory would be surrendered to
organized violence.
So what, if not ordinary nostalgia,
accounts for the intensity of my reaction? It has nothing to do with race.
Those who extenuate this lawless assault on emblems of the Southern past seem
honestly to believe that it springs from the detestation of racism — a loathing
I share. But for me, that seems too simple.
The 19th century historian Thomas
Babington Macaulay wrote of the bitter aftermath of the English civil war:
“One old Cavalier had seen half his manor house blown up. The hereditary elms
of another had been hewn down. A third could never go into his parish church
without being reminded by the defaced scutcheons and headless statues that
Oliver [Cromwell’s] redcoats had stabled their horses there.” Such are the
bitter memories of all civil wars, everywhere.
The U.S. has, until now, been
relatively exempt from such memories. The lines inscribed on the Statue of
Liberty read in part, “Give me ... the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.”
Not a flattering welcome, but a useful clue. Much of the immigration to these
shores is explained by a “yearning” to cut foreign ties and obligations and the
itch to be emancipated from history itself.
I had the good fortune to grow up in a
history-conscious household where historical realities were valued in their
fullness and memorials retained a living presence. Certainly, that included
Silent Sam, a remembrance of duty and self-sacrifice that I have known as an
unoffending visual companion since boyhood. Perhaps that is why its mob
destruction is like the severing of a limb. And it hurts.
Contributing
columnist Edwin M. Yoder Jr. of Chapel Hill is a former winner of the Pulitzer
Prize for editorial writing.
======================================
From: "Rector J. Donald
Childress" <boardoftrustees@wlu.edu>
Date: August 28, 2018 at 2:54:54 PM EDT
To:
Subject: Board of Trustees' Response to the Report of the Commission on Institutional History and Community
Reply-To: boardoftrustees@wlu.edu
Date: August 28, 2018 at 2:54:54 PM EDT
To:
Subject: Board of Trustees' Response to the Report of the Commission on Institutional History and Community
Reply-To: boardoftrustees@wlu.edu
|
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|
==================================
GLAMOUR MAGAZINE
https://www.glamour.com/story/its-not-just-confederate-monuments-all-statues-of-problematic-men-must-go/amp
https://www.glamour.com/story/its-not-just-confederate-monuments-all-statues-of-problematic-men-must-go/amp
It's Not Just Confederate Monuments—All Statues of Problematic Men Must Go
Samantha Willis August 12, 2018 2:41 PM
The death of Heather Heyer, the brutal
beating of DeAndre Harris and
the shatter of Marcus Martin's lower
leg as he pushed then fiancée Marissa Blair from the path of
James Alex Fields's Dodge Charger weren't enough to stop another white
supremacist rally from taking place exactly a year after
the violent Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
On Sunday the world will watch as right-wing
groups, white nationalists and neo-Nazis observe the anniversary of a deadly
day in history—this time in Washington, D.C.—that marked a turning point in
national dialogue about Confederate monuments and racism. The groups rallied on
August 12, 2017, to protest Charlottesville City Council’s vote to take down a
monument of Confederate General Robert E. Lee, which a 2016 petition demanded
be removed from one of Charlottesville’s parks. That petition was written by Zyahna
Bryant, a Charlottesville High School senior with serious eyes and a
quick wit who sliced through the rapid rhythm of her words. Bryant was just 16
when she penned the petition, inspired after watching human rights activist and
artist Bree Newsome snatch
the Confederate flag from atop a pole on the South Carolina Statehouse grounds
in June 2015. “This flag comes down today!” Newsome shouted, clad in all black,
dark brown dreads swinging beneath a helmet.
“It blew my mind,” says Bryant.
Many who are taking to the streets for the Unite the Right Rally 2 would
argue that there's no harm in keeping these symbols. But when is a statue more
than a statue? At this moment in America's present reality, we question: Are
monuments to men who rebelled against their mother country to preserve the
institution of slavery appropriate in public spaces? How can a flag marked with
stars and bars be a visceral symbol of shame to some, and pride to others?
Women—like Newsome and Bryant, of different ages and heritages and in every
quadrant of the country—are galvanizing efforts to remove, contextualize, and
understand these symbols of who we were to help us determine who we are. But
for all that we lost in Charlottesville, we gained something else too; a
seismic shift in public consciousness. Women
are organizing to confront not just men of the Confederacy, but the problematic
figures we've revered who used the tools of patriarchy and power to hurt women
and people of color.
The message is
clear. Women have had enough of bad men. And they aren't going to let them
stand forever. [….]
Elsewhere in
the country, women lead efforts to examine and contextualize statues of men
other than Confederate soldiers but whose place in history are also hotly
debated.
[….] Meanwhile,
communities of indigenous people lead calls to rename holidays evoking the name
of Christopher Columbus. Though he was indeed a remarkable navigator and
explorer, Columbus also led violent campaigns of enslavement and ushered in
centuries of abuse and exploitation of native peoples in the Americas by
European forces. Indigenous Peoples Day now replaces Columbus Day in at
least 55 cities nationwide. In January
the city council of San Jose, California, voted to remove a statue of Columbus
from its city hall lobby. Like all other dialogues concerning memorializing
controversial historical figures, the decision to boot Columbus from city hall
was not an easy one, says council member Sylvia Arenas.
“We went through a process about the statue,” says
Arenas, citing the concerns of the city’s Italian American community, which
contested removing the statue, believing the action was an affront to their
heritage. (Columbus was Italian.)
“It's not in opposition of Italian Americans, or
to negate the contributions of Italian Americans,” says Arenas. ”It's really
about being inclusive of indigenous communities, and the contributions that
they have made.”
Arenas, who says her heritage is Mexican, rarely saw
her ancestors’ contributions to history reflected in common historical
narratives. It was part of the reason she voted yes to the Columbus statue’s
dismissal from city hall.
“As a woman of color, to be able to contribute to
this decision of where the statue goes, it gives me the opportunity to correct
that narrative about indigenous people here, and to create a new narrative
about who we are as Californians and as people…. Everybody wants to find their
community's place in history.”
But even on the backdrop of a deadly
Charlottesville day, it's still difficult to convince protectors of these
symbols otherwise.
And there's proof that the resolve to keep statues
standing is strong, particularly of the Confederate type. Last month the Southern Poverty Law Center reported
that 113 Confederate monuments and symbols have been removed from public spaces
in various states and cities since 2015, while another 1,740 still stand
and more monuments are cropping up. The United
Daughters of the Confederacy, a women’s group which contributed to the creation
of an estimated 450 monuments and commemoratives since its 1894 founding,
continues its mission to “protect and preserve” Confederate symbols. When the
San Antonio city council voted to remove a Confederate monument from one of the
city’s parks last year, the local UDC chapter, one of the group’s chapters in
33 states, sued the city.
Debates about historically and socially
significant symbols will likely keep rolling through the country. Whether the
monuments and flags stay up or come down, whether we rename roads and schools
to reflect standards of our time instead of the past, it’s clear that women
enrich this national dialogue. By sharing their diverse perspectives gleaned
from a range of identities and life experiences, women play a critical role in contextualizing the ideals and people
in American history that we choose to memorialize—and those that we won’t.
Samantha Willis is a freelance
journalist and cocreator of the #UnmaskingCville and #UnmaskingRVA series,
based in Virginia. You can follow her on Twitter @WordsByWillis.
===============================
“We are not pacifists. Redneck Revolt
believes in using any and all means at
our disposal to gain our freedom and true liberty, provided those methods
do not violate our basic humanity or integrity. We believe in the inherit right
of every individual and community to defend themselves from those who
exploit or oppress them….Redneck
Revolt believes that there will have to be a complete restructuring
of society to provide for the survival and liberty of all people.”
==========================================
The
question that should be immediately raised is this: Why haven’t the FBI and
other monitors of violence gotten involved here? And where is the NC State
Bureau of Investigation and the public condemnation by Governor Roy Cooper?
And, finally, why is UNC-Chapel Hill hiring such advocates of violence to teach
in its faculty and manipulate the thinking of its students?
We should
demand answers!
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