The True Confederate History Month: March, Not April

NAACP Legal Defense Fund
The DefendersOnline
Posted By The Editors April 9th, 2010

By Lee A. Daniels
Virginia Governor Robert McDonnell got the wrong month this past week when he proclaimed April Confederate History Month.
The right month to place even greater emphasis on studying the Confederacy is March.
But, his “error” is something historian Barbara W. Tuchman would have understood. In her 1981 book, Practicing History: Selected Essays, she wrote that “Leaving things out because they do not fit is writing fiction, not history.”
In that regard, Confederate sympathizers have been writing fiction about what the Confederacy stood for ever since Robert E. Lee surrendered to U.S.Grant at Appomattox, Virginia April 9, 1865. Governor McDonnell’s choosing the wrong month was as deliberate as his initial omission of any reference to Virginia having been a slave state; and to the Confederacy having fought the war in order to maintain slavery, and as his implying that Virginia was then an all-white state, when in fact in 1860 blacks, both enslaved and free, comprised nearly half of its population.
But then, the contortions of the Republican Governor’s original proclamation are entirely consistent with the record of racially-coded politics the erstwhile “Party of Lincoln” has employed for the last four decades.
It has not been Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party for some time – not since the mass-action phase of the Civil Rights Movement helped shatter the depiction of the Confederacy as a heroic enterprise of benevolent whites fighting bravely for their “freedom.” That falsehood had distorted the consideration of the Civil War in school history texts, Hollywood films and the mainstream media for nearly a century. As Gov. McDonnell’s action proves, Confederate sympathizers have continued to try to reconstruct a gauzy mint-julep–on-the-veranda fiction about what their beloved Eden stood for.
They becloud the atmosphere with pious incantations of the “honor” and “courage” and “sacrifice” Confederate soldiers endured [link to proclamation coming] – as if individual soldiers’ bravery can cover up and purify fighting for an evil cause.
But such perfumed language can’t conceal the brutal facts about the human suffering that was the central characteristic of the South’s “peculiar institution.”

Full Story: http://www.thedefendersonline.com/2010/04/09/the-true-confederate-history-month-march-not-april/