XPost: alt.politics.obama, alt.politics.democrats.d, talk.politics.misc
XPost: alt.sports.football.pro.phila-eagles
On 16 Jan 2022, % posted some
news:K8udnRRpi_c5fnn8nZ2dnUU7-bednZ2d@giganews.com:
> On 2022-01-16 8:28 p.m., Ronny Koch wrote:
>> 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
>> Ť
>>
> what does this have to do with how great canada is
Hats, dude. Hats.
https://morningmail.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/trudeau-and-tits.jpg
--- SoupGate-DOS v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
|
