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The Militant (logo)
Vol. 79/No. 26 July 27, 2015
(front page)
‘Now take down the monuments to
enforcers of white supremacy!’
BY MAGGIE TROWE
To the cheers of thousands, the Confederate battle flag was removed from
the grounds of the South Carolina state Capitol July 10. This gave
impetus to the demand across the South and beyond that flags, statues
and monuments that honor defenders of slavery, lynching and segregation
and perpetuate lies about the Civil War and Radical Reconstruction come
down as well.
The rapid move by bourgeois politicians of all stripes to take down the
emblem of racist terror came in the wake of the massacre of nine people
at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, by a white supremacist,
and the broad outrage that act provoked.
As the South Carolina government was preparing to remove the flag, a
debate broke out in the House of Representatives on a proposal to
affirm, in an amendment to a spending bill, that the same flag could be
flown in national cemeteries on Confederate Memorial Day, recognized in
nine states, and portrayed on souvenirs in National Park gift shops.
Republican House Speaker John Boehner stopped the debate, which was so
out of step with national politics. He set the entire bill aside July 9
and called for a review of Confederate symbols and memorabilia.
In a July 9 address to the City Council, New Orleans Mayor Mitch
Landrieu called for the removal of monuments to Confederate Gens. Robert
E. Lee and P.G.T. Beauregard and to Jefferson Davis, president of the
pro-slavery Confederate States of America.
Landrieu also called for removing the Battle of Liberty Place monument,
a memorial to the vigilante White League, which carried out a
short-lived coup against Louisiana’s Reconstruction government in 1874.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky,
called June 23 for taking down the statue of Jefferson Davis from the
Kentucky state Capitol.
In South Carolina, the removal of the Confederate battle flag rekindled
the demand to remove a prominent statue of “Pitchfork” Ben Tillman,
governor and then U.S. senator from 1890 until 1918, from the statehouse
grounds. Tillman was a white supremacist terrorist who led the bloody
overthrow of Reconstruction in the state. His Red Shirt vigilantes
lynched seven African-Americans on July 8, 1876. A few weeks later he
presided over the assassination of State Sen. Simon Coker, who was Black.
This is a national discussion. About 350 took part in a “March of
Solidarity for the Charleston Nine” in Seattle July 7 sponsored by the
First AME Church, the NAACP, the Coalition of Black Trade Unionists and
others. Speakers supported the removal of the Confederate battle flag in
South Carolina and called for renaming the Jefferson Davis Highway in
Washington state.
Truth about Reconstruction
In a July 1 Washington Post article titled “Why Do People Believe Myths
About the Confederacy? Because Our Textbooks and Monuments Are Wrong,”
historian James Loewen assailed the widespread falsification that the
Civil War was not fought over slavery.
“The Confederates won with the pen (and the noose) what they could not
win on the battlefield: the cause of white supremacy and the dominant
understanding of what the war was all about,” Loewen wrote.
But “the noose” — lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan and the South Carolina
Red Shirts and the Louisiana Knights of the White Camelia and their ilk
— was no parenthetical factor in the rewriting of history. It was the
motor force.
The Civil War began in reality in the 1850s when Kansas farmers fought
off bands of mercenary thugs sent by the slave-owning oligarchy in the
South over whether that territory would become a free or slave state.
The Republican Party was born out of that conflict.
After Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president in 1860, the
slaveholders in seven states orchestrated secession from the United
States, and in April 1861 fired on Fort Sumter in Charleston, South
Carolina, beginning a bloody four-year war that ended in victory against
the slavocracy.
For a number of years following 1867, in South Carolina in particular,
the exploited rural producers, led by Blacks, established popular
revolutionary Radical Reconstruction governments in the states of the
former Confederacy. These governments took steps in the interests of
freed slaves, small farmers and other working people. Federal troops
were present to enforce the rights of the freed slaves, and popular
militias were formed composed of Blacks and Caucasians.
The defeat of Reconstruction required a bloody counterrevolution led by
the gangs of racist lynchers. They were given the green light by the
country’s capitalist rulers, who withdrew federal troops from the South
in 1877, fearing the growing alliance of freed slaves, small farmers and
the emerging industrial working class.
The resulting Jim Crow segregation, which included ideological
rationalization of its racist terror in history books and public
monuments, lasted until a powerful proletarian-led Black movement dealt
it a death blow in the middle of the last century.
Today the change in consciousness in the U.S. population, including in
the South, a product of decades of Black struggle, has kindled a desire
to tell the truth about the history of that struggle, and an urgency to
do so.
Mary Martin in Seattle contributed to this article.
Related articles:
‘Removal of Confederate battle flag is victory for working class’
How Black struggle has strengthened working class
Family protest no charges in killing by Georgia cop
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