I am a 60-something Caucasian Yankee, born and raised in Michigan.  My mother was British.  My father was the first in his Canadian-immigrant family born in the USA.  I have lived in North Carolina for almost 40 years, longer than my next door neighbors, who were born and raised here.  I understand a lot about the South, except for one thing: the pride in the Confederacy, its history, and its symbols.  I do understand the reverence for General Robert E. Lee.  I share it.  He was a great general and a good and great man.  He could have fought on but surrendered ultimately for the good of the whole country.

A few years ago, there was a movement in our town to “retire” the giant statue of the Confederate soldier that towers over the one-story public library.  Black citizens came to city meetings and pleaded their case.  The statue made them feel terrible.  They did not want their children to have to walk past it as they entered and left the public library.  They begged the powers-that-be to please at least move it, if not destroy it altogether.  One black man threatened “consequences.”  A letter-writing campaign ensued via the local newspaper.  One wit suggested that whatever happened, the gun the Confederate Soldier was carrying should at least be pointed North rather than East as it now is.  The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy prevailed.  “This statue is a monument to our war dead.  It represents our history!” they said.  The statue remains in front of the public library.  There were no “consequences.”

It does not take much to imagine how black people feel when they see this Confederate statue or walk past it.  It makes me cringe.  My grandchildren’s distant cousin, a 19-year-old boy who died fighting for the Confederacy, lies buried in this city.  And I understand wanting to honor his memory.  I understand a lot about the South, except for this one thing: what pride can anybody feel about seceding from the United States and fighting a war for the purpose of, ostensibly, “states’ rights” – rights based on the determination to maintain an agrarian economy of large plantations using the labor of an enslaved people, people the Constitution was written to eventually free?

How can there be pride in such a shameful history?  How is displaying these symbols referential and deferential to a Confederacy of states determined to enslave their fellow man for their own gain and fighting a war in order to continue to do it at all different from Germany today, were it to display Nazi symbols?  This is something I have never understood.

Please do not mock me.  Please: no name-calling.  Please simply explain it to me.  If it makes any sense at all, I assure you, I will understand it.