“More than 1,500 Confederate monuments stand in communities like Charlottesville with the potential to unleash more turmoil and bloodshed,” posted the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a radical leftist organization that likes to label normal conservative groups as “hate groups.”
“It’s time to take them down,” the SPLC posted, along with a map of where Confederate-linked statues, towns, cities, counties, and schools are located.
Apparently the SPLC is urging visitors to their website to write letters to the editor of local newspapers, reminding the readers, “White supremacists incited deadly violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, last week in defense of a Confederate monument.” The sample letter instructed letter-writers to include a reference to any particular Confederate monument located in the community.
“If our government continues to pay homage to the Confederacy, people of color can never be sure they will be treated fairly,” the SPLC letter added. “And we will never solve our community’s problems if an entire group of citizens is alienated or feels targeted for discrimination.”
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What is particularly disturbing about the SPLC map is that it not only includes statues, but also lists counties (such as Lee County, Florida) and cities, and even dozens of schools, such as Jeff Davis Middle School in Hazlehurst, Georgia; Robert E. Lee Elementary school in Columbia, Missouri; and Stonewall Jackson Elementary School in Bristol, Georgia.
Interestingly, after the Civil War, Lee became a university president. Before the war, Jackson was a champion of education for black children. Since both men were educators, naming schools after them seems highly appropriate.
While the SPLC decries Confederate statues, place names, and school names as somehow “racist,” a plurality of African-Americans (44 percent to 40 percent) favor keeping the statues standing, according to a NPR/PBS/Marist poll. Sixty-two percent of all Americans favor keeping statues that honor leaders of the late Confederate States.
The inclusion of school names on the map seems particularly irresponsible and worrisome, considering that there is a history of violence as a result of SPLC postings. For example, a similar graphic apparently inspired a terrorist attack upon the Family Research Council (FRC) in 2012. Floyd Corkins broke into the FRC’s D.C. headquarters with the intention to murder every person inside. During an interrogation with the FBI, Corkins said he was inspired to kill people inside the FRC building because it was listed by the SPLC as an “anti-gay group.”
This past summer, a Bernie Sanders supporter, James Hodgkinson, targeted Republican members of Congress who were practicing for an upcoming charity baseball game between Democratic and Republican members of Congress. He nearly killed Representative Steve Scalise (R-La.). Hodgkinson indicated on Facebook that he was a fan of the SPLC, which had repeatedly attacked Scalise.
There are 109 public schools in America named after either Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, or other Confederate icons, that may now become targets of some person inspired by the SPLC map.
One school superintendent, Aurora Lora of the Oklahoma City Public Schools, was on board with the SPLC, even raising the issue of what to do about four grade schools in her district that she claimed had Confederate-linked names. (Previously, the district had decided to remove the mascot name “Redskins” from Capitol Hill High School, charging it was demeaning to Native American Indian students.)
But Lora incorrectly claimed that two schools were named after Confederate generals — Lee and Wheeler: They were actually named after early civic leaders in the community. Another was named for Stonewall Jackson. The fourth one was named for Stand Watie, the last Confederate general to surrender, on June 23, 1865, in what is now southeastern Oklahoma, but what was then Indian Territory.
Watie was the only American Indian to achieve the rank of general during the Civil War, and was a war-time chief of the Cherokee Nation.
Hopefully, none of the schools in Oklahoma City, or anywhere else in the country will be attacked by terrorists inspired by the SPLC. But violence has already occurred against supporters of Confederate monuments.
In the summer of 2015, Confederate flag activist Anthony Hervey, an African-American, was driven off the road and killed in rural Mississippi while returning from Alabama, where he had spoken at a rally of 400 in Birmingham in support of Confederate heritage. Hervey, who was 49, had written a book, Why I Wave the Confederate Flag: Written by a Black Man, and was the founder of the Black Confederate Soldiers Foundation.
Hervey was given a ride from Mississippi to Alabama by Arlene Barnum of Oklahoma, another African-American who is a Confederate heritage activist. Hervey was killed in the incident, and she spent time in the hospital.
When she left the hospital, members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) provided her anescort back to her own home in southeastern Oklahoma. She described the attack on her and Hervey in a personal interview with The New American. Barnum told me that Southern pride was instilled in her from the time she was a little girl, growing up in Louisiana. She explained that her ancestor, Richard Stills, was a Confederate soldier.
She lamented that if the “race-baiting” did not stop, she feared we are going to see a “race war.”
The late Anthony Hervey observed in 2000, “We currently live under a psychological form of reconstruction. Whites are made to feel guilty for sins of their ancestors, and blacks are made to feel downtrodden.”
