http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/06/28/1396273/--Gone-With-the-Wind-The-real-Southern-heritage?detail=email
Southerners have got to realize that Margaret Mitchell was a writer of fiction. She did not chronicle the romance of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. She made it up. Of course, she was helped by historians like Edward A. Pollard, author of the 1866 whitewash of the war, The Lost Cause (The Standard Southern History of the War of the Confederates). She was also helped by the articles of Jubal Early, and the autobiography of Jefferson Davis, all of whom claimed that, in spite of all written evidence to the contrary, the Civil War was not fought over slavery. But it was always a fairy tale.
Southerners stole people. They robbed people of their freedom. And they did not just rob them of their liberty and their labor, they robbed them of their progeny. They robbed their descendants of a future. This is the heritage of the South. This is the infamous Lost Cause that many today still consider so noble that they have enshrined it into a veritable altar at which we are expected to pay homage. Or at the very least respect.
I don't respect treason.
I was born and raised in Chicago, perhaps the most segregated city in the United States, populated by racist blue-color workers who succeeded in keeping the migrants from the South, who came with hearts full of hope, locked up in crowded tenements. Who refused them mortgages and robbed them of their right to buy a home that could provide a foundation for the American dream that they wanted for their children. I writhe in shame when I think of what my hometown did and how its residents rioted when Martin Luther King Jr. came to visit. Bull Connor had nothing on Chicago bigots.
The difference between myself and the Southerners who insist that their flag represents their heritage, is that I don't deny what that heritage is. I recognize the evil that was done in my name, not just to blacks, but to the people who lived here long before the Europeans even knew that the Americas existed. I am ashamed of what was done and lack any desire to dress it up, to build statues to it, and demand that its victims honor and respect it.
The South needs to realize that it is not, nor has it ever been, a separate nation. It failed to achieve that. Its heritage is the same one shared by every Yankee from Maine to Washington—save the treason, of course. And the slavery. Confederate soldiers were not the only ones who died — their treason resulted in the deaths of at least 750,000, and perhaps as many as 850,000, Americans. The Union dead deserve respect. They died to make men free. Not to keep them enslaved.
The peace terms offered to Robert E. Lee by Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox were incredibly generous. Officers were allowed to retain their side arms and baggage, all troops were permitted to take their own horses home with them after giving a parole that they would no longer fight the United States. So noble were both generals at Appomattox that the surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia was called "the Gentlemen's Agreement."
And Grant, on hearing a rumor that the was a movement to arrest Lee for treason, said that he would resign his command of the Army before he would execute such an order. Lee refused to countenance any talk of a continuing guerilla war.
This is how the South repaid that generosity and lack of malice: They agreed to the election of Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of Union troops after a little more than a decade's enforcement of Reconstruction, and the promise to provide equal rights of citizenship to all residents of the South, regardless of color.
They lied.
Immediately after the removal of U.S. Army troops, steps were taken to disenfranchise blacks, while their numbers were used to inflate the representation of the Southern states in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Slavery was re-introduced in the Southern states through the loophole in the Thirteenth Amendment, eventually allowing blacks to be sentenced to prison for theft of as little as $10. While in prison, their labor was sold by the state to whoever was willing to pay, including many Northern entrepreneurs. There was no responsibility assigned to the purchasers of such labor. They never worried about the health of their slaves because they were so easy to replace.
Within 20 years, of the almost 1 million men who died in that war, only monuments remained. There were no real changes to the Southern economy, which was always based on slavery, or the Southern attitudes, which were always based on white supremacy. The rest of the nation, focused on the gilded age of the robber barons, had little energy to spare for the men and women they fought to free and who were now just as tightly enslaved under Jim Crow as they had been before the war.
This is the heritage the Southerners want us to respect and to honor. This heritage of deceit, treachery, and hate.
i posted so much of this article because i read it i didn't want anything lost by having to go to the article find where i stopped quoting and continue, this way the pertinent stuff is right here.
how do you take a past like this and hold it as a great heritage while using God as the basis of this heritage while defiling what God and the Bible and what Jesus taught are nowhere to be found, easy you deny the written history you erect statues and reinvent the characters that played the biggest roles in this atrocity of mans inhumanity to man.
they go about life fingers in ears hands over eyes and mouth wide open. this is why when they talk it almost always is verbatim the same rhetoric is a script that all those who oppose must follow, it works but now people are actually hearing the words and seeing between their fingers and fingers loosening within their ears and recognizing that this is not something you write home to mama about.
passing on a heritage of hate, racism and bigotry to their kids is ruining their children's lives especially when such a reprehensibly controversial subject is fading and a new day is starting those4 kids will be ostracized and potentially become those we read about today as the mass murderers or home grown terrorist not a loving family value no matter how much the republicans try to say it is.
