The Forever Argument

The Mississippi state flag incorporates the Confederate
"Stars & Bars"

 At this writing South Carolina has officially removed the Confederate flag from its state house grounds. Mississippi remains the last state to officially display the Confederate flag, as it is designed into its current state flag (shown above).

"The past is never dead. It's not even past.” --William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

The issue of the Confederate flag is attached to the hip of the reason the American Civil War was fought in the first place. If the war was fought over slavery, it follows the flag represents the powers that hoped to secure slavery indefinitely. If otherwise, then the flag might reasonably be construed as representing something more benign.

It is hard to fathom at this late date, 154 years after the start of hostilities between North and South, that we still argue this case. But here we are, trapped in some exasperating version of the film “Groundhog Day,” doomed to present the same lecture again and again to a seemingly implacable audience, unable to acknowledge the uncomfortable truths of its (now) distant past. 

Perhaps, you say, there will always be cranks, deniers, et cetera. Is this really a mainstream issue? Emma Brown writing in the Washington Post several days ago discussed the new social studies texts for Texas’s public schools. (Texas centralizes textbook selection and thus has an inordinate influence on how such texts are written). According to Brown, school children will be taught that the causes of the Civil War are “sectionalism, states’ rights, and slavery,” with “slavery” intentionally in the third slot. 

Patricia Hardy, a member of the Texas Board of Education when this textbook was approved in 2010, commented at the time, “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.” 

I must assume Ms. Hardy believes that with slavery hypothetically off the table in 1860, the South would still have seceded. Or that the two halves of the nation would have fought a war over something as hazy as states’ rights and sectionalism. And for what it’s worth, I had to look up “sectionalism.”

Company E, 4th U.S. Colored troops, November 17, 1865

By war's end African-American troops numbered some 178,000, comprising 10% of the Union Army. Most were former slaves, freed by the Emancipation Proclamation. If Ms. Hardy could travel back in time and talk with the African-American soldiers of Company E (pictured above), does she really believe they would say anything other than they fought for their freedom and the freedom of other African-Americans still in slavery?

Several southern states, including Texas, issued "Declarations of Causes," specifically intended to clarify their reasons for seceding from the Union. Here is a pertinent paragraph from Texas's (but I encourage everyone to read the whole thing):

That in this free government all white men are and of right ought to be entitled to equal civil and political rights; that the servitude of the African race, as existing in these States, is mutually beneficial to both bond and free, and is abundantly authorized and justified by the experience of mankind, and the revealed will of the Almighty Creator, as recognized by all Christian nations; while the destruction of the existing relations between the two races, as advocated by our sectional enemies, would bring inevitable calamities upon both and desolation upon the fifteen slave-holding States.

Hmmm...That seems pretty clear.

Ms. Hardy and other Southern apologists would have us imagine a strange asymmetry, wherein the North fought for one reason, and the South for something quite different, leading inevitably to a recognition by the warring parties that it was all just a big misunderstanding. Well, that didn't happen.

 

In truth, it all seems preposterous, if not downright laughable. States’ rights and sectionalism existed as fighting issues only insofar as they related to the national argument over slavery. It was never about state’s rights in the abstract, it was always states’ rights regarding the laws governing slave ownership.

In his June 23rd speech to the South Carolina Senate, Paul Thurmond essentially asserts this, but even he, scion of the Old South, felt compelled to add an “in part,” 

“I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery”

Perhaps Thurmond needed this gratuitous qualification not to lose the support of some key South Carolina legislators for the upcoming fight over the flag. If so, and only if so, I’ll grant him a pass.

The war was about slavery. Abraham Lincoln was under no illusion as to why he was prosecuting a war that took the lives of 620,000 fighting men (more recent estimates go as high as 850,000). 

Here are two excerpts from Lincoln’s 2^nd Inaugural Address. The first excerpt succinctly lays out the political division between North and South at the start of hostilities in 1861. The second expresses Lincoln’s state of mind at the war’s end (37 days before the South surrendered) when he had come to believe the war was God’s penance for the sin of slavery.

“One-eighth of the whole population (of the United States) were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it…”

“If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”

Lincoln notably makes no reference to anything other than slavery. Without slavery there was no war. The Confederate flag, no matter how any individual regards it today, is inextricably bound up and tainted by slavery. The taint can’t be washed away or covered up. It will always be there. And, thus, as has been recommended by many across the political spectrum, it needs to be removed from our public places.




 

The Rhetorical One-Two Punch

Emanuel AME Church

For those who like political oratory, and I do, the last week of June was a good week.

Two speeches addressed the murder of nine members of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston (often called “Mother Emanuel”). Both speeches, infused with Christian teaching, asked the audience to take action. Both speeches combined heartfelt performance and well-crafted message. 

The orators represented disparate positions on the political spectrum. Paul Thurmond is a Republican state senator, and, notably, the son of Strom Thurmond, arguably the South’s most famous segregationist politician. Barack Obama is the 44^th President of the United States, a Democrat, and the only child of a white American woman from Wichita, Kansas and a black man of the Luo tribe from Kenya.

Taken together these two speeches represent a kind of one-two punch against the continued display of the Confederate flag.

Before I go any further, I recommend the reader listen to the two speeches if he or she has not already done so. It is quite literally witnessing history. Imagine, if you will, that we had a YouTube of Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Here are the links.

Paul Thurmond's S.C. Senate Speech (7:33 minutes) 

Barack Obama's Eulogy for Clementa Pinckney (37:46 minutes)

With any speech, context, audience, and occasion is important.

As reported and pretty much beyond doubt, 21-year old Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel AME Church on the evening of June 17^th, joined a weekly prayer session, and an hour later pulled out a handgun and shot ten churchgoers, nine of whom died. The victims were shot multiple times at close range. Roof’s weapon was a 0.45-caliber automatic, a powerful handgun. The scene, I must assume, was horrific.

The Symbol of Our Discontent

The next day Roof was apprehended by police. While it appears Roof carried out the murders alone, online photos and a personal website connect him with the white supremacist movement. Pure and simple, this was a hate crime.

Among the white supremacist symbols Roof selected for his web persona was the Confederate battle flag, more commonly known as the Confederate flag.

On June 23^rd, six days after the shooting at Mother Emanuel, Paul Thurmond took the floor of the South Carolina Senate. He didn’t mention his father during his speech. (Everyone listening knew who his father was). As a U.S. Senator, Strom Thurmond famously once spoke continuously for 24 hours, 15 minutes to filibuster the Civil Rights Act of 1957 (nevertheless, it passed). Now his son, speaking on a different senate floor nearly 60 years later, conveyed a quite different message. He spoke for about six minutes.

Paul Thurmond on South Carolina Senate Floor

Thurmond began by describing his personal friendship with and admiration for the deceased Clementa Pinckney, the senior pastor of Emanuel AME and also a state senator. He spoke of a moving vigil he had attended for Pinckney and the other slain church members. If I am any judge of what happens in a man’s heart, in the days following the Mother Emanuel murders Paul Thurmond had experienced an epiphany, which had then compelled him to address his fellow senators. 

Seemingly a man who takes his faith seriously, perhaps also adroitly reading his audience, Thurmond introduced his message by recounting the New Testament's “Parable of the Sower” (Mark 4). I suspect you are familiar with it. A farmer sows his seed, and while some seed is devoured by birds, some scorched by the sun, some choked by weeds, the seed that falls on good soil produces a crop many times what was originally sown.

Thurmond hoped that the Mother Emanuel tragedy had created a rich soil within the hearts of his fellow Senators and thus an opportunity to effect change in his state.

“I think the time is right and the ground is fertile for us to make progress as a state and to come together and remove the Confederate battle flag from prominent statue outside the Statehouse and put it in the museum. It is time to acknowledge our past, atone for our sins and work towards a better future. That future must be built on symbols of peace, love, and unity. That future cannot be built on symbols of war, hate, and divisiveness.”

He continued, attacking one of the enduring myths of the South, and a source of its persistent resistance to retiring this particular symbol of slavery,

“…for the life of me, I will never understand how anyone could fight a civil war based, in part, on the desire to continue the practice of slavery…These practices were inhumane and were wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Whether Paul Thurmond’s speech directly influenced President Obama’s two days later I don’t know, but it sounds like the two men were fishing in the same waters. 

President Obama delivered a eulogy for the Reverend Clementa Pinckney, Emanuel AME’s senior pastor and a colleague of Paul Thurmond’s in the South Carolina Senate. He spoke for 35 minutes to 5,400 mostly African American mourners at TD Arena, a few blocks from Mother Emanuel. He was the final speaker for a funeral service that had begun four hours earlier.

The murders at Mother Emanuel AME demanded a response from the President. The mourners in TD Arena surely expected an address that would honor all the victims, not just Reverend Pinckney, and somehow give meaning to the whole awful event. In this, the President did not disappoint.

The President’s eulogy began, like any, praising the qualities and accomplishments of the deceased. But as he recounted Reverend Pinckney’s life, he artfully interwove the role of the black church in the black community, and how among black churches Mother Emanuel AME held a place of honor, both for its illustrious history—it was started by free blacks and slaves in 1816—and its prominence in the civil rights movement.

“A sacred place, this church…for every American who cares about the steady expansion of human rights and human dignity in this country; a foundation stone for liberty and justice for all.”

Against this backdrop the President then brought in Dylann Roof (unnamed, just called “the killer”), and asserted that this young man understood his act as belonging to a long tradition of white supremacist attacks on black churches. Attacks intended to cowl and control—in today’s language, acts of terror.

Dylann Roof's Online Persona

Then, in one exhilarating moment, he introduced the central theme of his sermon.

“Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas. He (Dylann Roof) didn't know he was being used by God. Blinded by hatred, the alleged killer could not see the grace surrounding Reverend Pinckney and that Bible study group…”

All that week the President had been thinking about this concept of God’s grace. He had seen grace in action when the families of the murdered expressed words of forgiveness at Dylann Roof’s arraignment. And while he didn’t explicitly say it, he probably believed he had witnessed the power of grace again when the son of Strom Thurmond spoke on the floor of the South Carolina Senate two days earlier.

President Obama had almost certainly given careful thought to communicating his message beyond the confines of the TD Arena. A hard reality, of which the President was well aware, is that many white Americans in the “red” states of the South are deaf to his words. Yet, knowing the religiosity of this region, and the solemnity of this particular occasion, he could reasonably expect some fraction of this normally unreachable audience to tune in to this address. Christian “grace” is something they would often have heard from their own pulpit. In this sense grace became the rhetorical weapon to pierce this audience’s ideological armor.

The President described grace as neither earned, nor merited, but “rather grace is the free and benevolent favor of God.” The President believed that as a consequence of the Mother Emanuel tragedy, God had given us the gift of grace; and with this gift, new insight into the African American experience. First and foremost, here, was the African-American experience of the Confederate flag.

"For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens. It's true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge…the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systemic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now…

Removing the flag from this state's capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought -- the cause of slavery -- was wrong…By taking down that flag, we express God's grace."

Other areas of social blindness followed--criminal justice, guns, jobs, voting rights, poverty, schools—but always the President returned to the idea of God’s grace, which, once accepted, allows us to see anew and comprehend the complexity of truth. He acknowledged that there will never be unanimity on the crafting of policy—“this is a big, raucous place, America is” (channeling Master Yoda for a moment). He urged us not to “avoid the uncomfortable truths about the prejudice that still infects our society” or “to slip into a comfortable silence again.”

Finally, quoting the writer Marilynne Robinson, a personal friend, he exhorted us to find "that reservoir of goodness, beyond, and of another kind, that we are able to do each other in the ordinary cause of things"; equating this reservoir of goodness with the gift of grace, and arguing with it “anything is possible."

President Obama Singing "Amazing Grace"

In a second moment of rhetorical magic, the President repeated the line “amazing grace," as if publicly ruminating in wonderment the power of the thing, and then, after a long pause, began to sing the famous hymn of the same name.

Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound)
   That sav'd a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
   Was blind, but now I see.

Concluding, the President exhorted us not to squander this gift of grace, a special gift passed from the fallen to us, the living.

It is a moment of considerable power. I have found the speech grows with re-listening.

The hymn “Amazing Grace” is itself full of symbolism apropos to this moment. John Newton, its author, was a former Atlantic trade slaver who became a noted abolitionist, publishing a popular pamphlet on slavery considered instrumental in the English outlawing slavery in 1807.

Today, July 10, 2015, almost at the same time as I post this commentary, South Carolina formally removed the Confederate flag from the its grounds. It still flies in other places in the South. You can see it on the  upper left-hand corner of the Mississippi state flag.