XPost: alt.fan.states.missouri, chi.media, alt.journalism.criticism   
   XPost: sac.general   
   From: rkoch@banmlkday.com   
      
   Every state celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but not every   
   state celebrates it the same way. In New Hampshire, King’s   
   birthday is “Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights Day,” an   
   explicit celebration of the entire civil rights movement (and a   
   compromise with lawmakers who didn’t want a day devoted to King   
   alone). In Idaho, it’s “Martin Luther King, Jr.–Idaho Human   
   Rights Day,” a celebration of justice writ large. And in three   
   states—Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi—MLK Day is also Robert   
   E. Lee Day.   
      
   This isn’t a different Robert E. Lee—some forgotten crusader for   
   human equality. No, this is the Gen. Robert E. Lee who led   
   Confederate armies in war against the United States, who   
   defended a nation built on the “great truth” that the “negro is   
   not equal to the white man,” and whose armies kidnapped and sold   
   free black Americans whenever they had the opportunity.   
      
   Despite his betrayal of the Union (a stark contrast to fellow   
   Virginian Winfield Scott, who refused to join the Confederacy)   
   and his treatment of enslaved black Americans—as a slavedriver,   
   he sold children and oversaw brutal punishments, including   
   sewing brine into the wounds of returned fugitives—Lee’s popular   
   image is of an honorable and decent man who fought well and   
   loathed slavery. (The former is debatable and the latter is   
   true, in that Lee thought slaveholding a burdensome occupation.)   
      
   There are three other states that commemorate the life of Lee:   
   Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. The difference is that their   
   celebrations are all separate from MLK Day, if only by a few   
   days: Virginia’s Robert E. Lee Day was this past Friday.   
      
   In fairness, Lee Day isn’t a recent invention. The general’s   
   birthday falls on Jan. 19, and the first official commemoration   
   was marked by the Virginia legislature in 1889, a decade after   
   the end of Reconstruction and well into the period of racial   
   regression, when Southern state legislatures dismantled efforts   
   at biracial education, imposed Jim Crow, and turned a blind eye   
   to anti-black terrorism. And in 1904, Robert E. Lee Day became   
   “Lee-Jackson Day” after Virginia added Confederate Gen. Thomas   
   “Stonewall” Jackson to the holiday.   
      
   All of this raises an obvious question: How did Lee get tangled   
   up in our national commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. and   
   the civil rights movement? The best answer is convenience. In   
   states that commemorated Lee, lawmakers who approved of MLK Day   
   didn’t want to create two holidays in January. Instead, they   
   combined the two days. As a concept, it was a poor pairing. As a   
   bureaucratic solution, it worked.   
      
   But over the next two decades, under pressure from civil rights   
   groups, several states would either end their Lee commemorations   
   or move them to a different day. In 2000, pushed by Republican   
   Gov. Jim Gilmore, Virginia would end the state’s “Lee-Jackson-   
   King Day” and reserve the third Monday of January for the civil   
   rights leader.   
      
   It should be said that the “Lee” part of “Lee-King Day” is   
   mostly downplayed in states that have the holiday. Outside of a   
   few towns and counties, there aren’t any public events in honor   
   of Lee’s memory. The general, a symbol of the white South—or at   
   least, a version of it—exists in quiet tension with King, a   
   symbol of a more modern, integrated South. Still, it’s not hard   
   to find some commemoration of Lee, who continues to capture   
   Southern imaginations. “If the image of Lee changes in history,   
   the man himself did not, even in the face of the greatest   
   provocations,” writes Paul Greenberg for the Arkansas-Democrat   
   Gazette in its annual editorial on the life of Lee, “His   
   victories were great, but his honor greater.”   
      
   As a Virginian, I understand the drive to praise Lee. His honor   
   is an undeniable and worthy quality. But we shouldn’t forget   
   what Lee fought for. Not for freedom or for liberty, but for   
   perpetual bondage and a South that forever held its black   
   citizens as slaves and servants. And while Lee spent the post-   
   war period as an advocate for reconciliation, he also opposed   
   the nascent moves toward racial egalitarianism, condemning black   
   suffrage, even as many black leaders favored voting rights for   
   former Confederates and the education for their children.   
      
   Indeed, if anyone should want an end to official celebrations of   
   Lee and the Confederacy, it’s the white Southerners who hold on   
   to this memory. The general isn’t just a totem of the   
   Confederacy or an avatar for abstract qualities of honor and   
   service; he’s a symbol of destructive white resistance to the   
   opportunities of Reconstruction. If the white South had moved in   
   a direction that opposed Lee’s values—if it had embraced the   
   great potential that came with the end of slavery—we would have   
   a different, and likely better, America than the one we live in.   
   '   
   http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01   
   /robert_e_lee_day_some_southern_states_still_celebrate_the_confe   
   derate_general.html   
      
      
      
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