Sleep sweetly in your humble graves,
Sleep, martyrs of a fallen cause!
— Henry Timrod
Last year, 160 Confederate memorials—19% of the Confederate memorials across the South—were removed from public view, according to the AP. Meanwhile, cities and states removed the names of Confederates from hundreds of streets, schools, public buildings, parks, and forts.
“These racist symbols only serve to uphold revisionist history and the belief that white supremacy remains morally acceptable,” Lecia Brooks, chief of staff of the Southern Poverty Law Center, told the AP. “Exposing children to anything that falsely promotes the idea of white superiority and Black inferiority is dehumanizing.”
But cancelling the Confederacy rankles the unreconstructed, who, despite the words and actions of contemporaries, insist the American Civil War was not about preserving slavery, but the "rights" of White Southerners.
Yesterday, Representative Liz Cheney, the maverick Republican from Wyoming, begged her party to assert “we aren’t the party of white supremacy” in the wake of the January siege of Capitol Hill. "You saw the symbols of Holocaust denial, for example, at the Capitol that day; you saw the Confederate flag being carried through the rotunda, and I think we as Republicans in particular, have a duty and an obligation to stand against that, to stand against insurrection.”
But she's alone in her opinion.
Who will mourn the Confederate dead?
The GOP. Racist to the bone.
