Push to remove Confederate statues stalls in rural areas

Map and legend by The Washington Post, enhanced by The Rural Blog; for a larger version, click on the image.

In the wake of protests about racism and police brutality over the past few months, at least 63 Confederate statues nationwide have been taken down by protesters or removed by local officials, but that's mostly happened in liberal, urban areas. Rural communities are far less likely to push for their removal, according to an exclusive tally kept by The Associated Press. For instance, "North Carolina still has at least 69 monuments on public land. Of those, 56 are in counties that voted for President Donald Trump in 2016; 52 are in towns of fewer than 20,000," AP's Rebecca Santana and Jonathan Drew report.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, more than 700 Confederate statues remain standing, many in the rural South, with the largest shares in Georgia and Virginia. The AP list shows that 2020 has been one of the busiest years yet for removal of such statues.

"Still, in a sign that the removal movement might be spreading, local governments in several less populous areas of Mississippi, Louisiana and South Carolina have recently approved removals but not yet taken down the monuments," Santana and Drew report.

Laws in some Southern states, counties and communities may make removing the monuments difficult, Bonnie Berkowitz and Adrian Blanco report for The Washington Post.

Confederate monuments are coming down, but more than 700 remain, and removing them may be legally tricky

Map and legend by The Washington Post, enhanced by The Rural Blog; for a larger version, click on it.

More than 70 of the nation’s Confederate monuments have been removed since the 2015 shooting in Charleston, S.C.—some by local governments and some by protesters—and almost a third of them have come down in the weeks since George Floyd’s death. But around 700 monuments remain, “along with hundreds of names on roads, schools, parks and the like,” Bonnie Berkowitz and Adrian Blanco report for The Washington Post.

Georgia and Virginia have the largest share of remaining monuments, with more than 100 each. Many were built decades after the Civil War, even outside Confederate states, as a show of support for Jim Crow laws, and at least 35 new monuments have been dedicated since 2000. Though the monuments have attracted debate and legal issues for decades, the recent spike in attention has prompted many city leaders to remove the monuments, Berkowitz and Blanco report.

However, “laws in some states make removing Confederate symbols extremely difficult, including in South Carolina, where a law written in 2000 requires two-thirds of legislators have to approve any removal,” Berkowitz and Blanco report. “An Alabama law restricting Confederate removals was enacted in 2017, and it is unclear whether or how the recent removals square with it.”

In his first story as a New York Times reporting fellow, rural reporter Will Wright looks at the problem of where to take Confederate monuments that local governments no longer want.

A third way emerges in Confederate monuments debate: Keep them, but place signs explaining their racist history

A Confederate monument in Nashville was vandalized
in June (Associated Press photo by Mark Humphrey)

Monuments to Confederates have become more controversial in recent years, with some saying they celebrate racism and should be removed, and others saying they should stay because they're just a way of remembering history. Now some places "are exploring a new way to deal with the country’s Confederate monuments: place explanatory panels on or alongside the statues detailing the real history behind them," Hannah Natanson reports for The Washington Post. "It’s the latest frontier in the nation’s ongoing — and, in recent years, horrifically violent — reckoning with the statues, troubling testaments to the country’s racist past."

There are about 1,700 Confederate monuments. Most went up between the 1890s and 1920s with the rise of Jim Crow laws, and more were erected in the 1940s and 1950s after desegregation of the military and public schools, to assert white supremacy, says James Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association.

"Though many African Americans have disliked and protested against the monuments since their installation, Grossman said, opposition to Confederate symbols exploded into the mainstream following deadly racial violence in Charleston, S.C., in 2015 and in Charlottesville in 2017," Natanson reports. "Towns and cities across the country have been struggling to decide how to handle their statues ever since."

The issue has been compounded in many states or localities by laws that protect the monuments. "At least seven states passed legislation in recent years to protect their Confederate monuments, a wave that began around the 2000s and includes a law passed as recently as 2017," Natanson reports. "Such statutes, which vary in language but generally prohibit removal of the monuments, are in effect in Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia." Those were seven of the Confederate states; the others are Florida, Louisiana, Arkansas and Texas.

So, if the statues can't be removed, many support installing markers that note the racism of the Confederacy. "Proponents of installing explanatory markers say that — especially in states where removal is illegal — the tactic is realistic, inexpensive and swiftly achievable," Natanson reports.

Big conservation and historic-sites bill passes Senate 92-8

"The Senate on Tuesday passed the most sweeping conservation legislation in a decade, protecting millions of acres of land and hundreds of miles of wild rivers across the country and establishing four new national monuments honoring heroes including Civil War soldiers and a civil rights icon," Juliet Eilperin and Dino Grandoni report for The Washington Post.

The measure enjoyed broad bipartisan support, passing 92-8, and is expected to pass the House after the mid-February recess. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out, "It touches every state, features the input of a wide coalition of our colleagues, and has earned the support of a broad, diverse coalition of many advocates for public lands, economic development and conservation."

The bill designates 1.3 million acres as wilderness, bans mining on more than 370,000 acres around Yellowstone National Park in Montana and the Methow Headwaters in Washington, and permanently funnels offshore drilling revenue into the Land and Water Conservation Fund, which it reauthorizes. The Congressional Budget Office projects that the bill would save taxpayers $9 million.

The bill creates five new national monuments: St. Francis Dam Disaster in California, Jurassic in Utah, the home of civil-rights leaders Medgar and Myrlie Evers in Mississippi, and the Mill Springs Battlefield and Camp Nelson, both Civil War sites in Kentucky. (President Trump made Camp Nelson, where black troops were recruited and trained, a national monument last year.) The bill significantly expands five national parks: Death Valley and Joshua Tree in California, and Kennesaw Mountain National Battlefield, Ocmulgee Mounds and Fort Frederica in Georgia.

"The bill reauthorizes and funds the Neotropical Migratory Bird Conservation Act through 2022, which provides habitat protection for more than 380 bird species, and codifies a signature program of President Barack Obama’s," the Post reports. "The Every Kid Outdoors Act, allows U.S. fourth-graders and their families to visit national parks free."

Town thought it had put racial conflict behind it; then an accident took out a Confederate statue

The Demopolis monument in 2013

The protests and violence in Charlottesville, Va., sparked by the City Council's decision to move a Robert E. Lee statue from a city park, have brought into sharp focus an increasingly contentious issue in Southern cities and towns: what to do with Confederate monuments. The town of Demopolis, Ala., has grappled with an unusual variant of that question. After a police officer accidentally crashed into the local Confederate statue and knocked it over, locals had to decide whether to put it back up. David Montgomery's Washington Post story about the Demopolis statue is a long read, but provides an excellent look at a town of 7,500 people who thought they had put issues about race behind them—until the crash put it back in front of them.

Demopolis defies easy stereotypes. It's not an integrated utopia—whites and African Americans generally live on opposite sides of town, and Mayor John Laney acknowledges that "We’ve got a city of 7,800, but it’s essentially two cities of 3,900 because the demographics is such that we don’t work together. We need to do things to change that." But the police chief is African American and oversees a racially balanced police force, the fire chief and building inspector are African American, and the first African American district attorney in Alabama history was a lawyer in Demopolis. And the townspeople are proud of the progress they've made in integrating their town. "Residents take pride in the fact that, during school desegregation in the middle of the 20th century, Demopolis distinguished itself from many of its Black Belt neighbors," Montgomery reports, using the regional term that first referred to the soil but now more to the people. "Black children and white children were funneled into the same schools, and the habit took. True, an all-white private academy cropped up, but it didn’t last, unlike in other towns where private schools still drain the public schools of white children. Today, Demopolis High School’s student body is roughly as balanced as the population of the town."

Copyright map by Sperling's Best Places

So when the Demopolis monument was knocked down in July 2016, residents worried that the debate over its fate would destroy the town's hard-fought progress. "The last thing I wanted to happen was Demopolis to become a battleground between the Sons [of Confederate Veterans] and the Daughters of the Confederacy and the Black Lives movement," said Mike Grayson, who was the mayor at the time of the crash. "We had worked too hard for too many years." He named a committee of six local civic and business leaders, half white and half black, to study whether the statue should be restored.

The public discourse in Demopolis is remarkable for its politeness; neighbors seem to want to preserve the peace, and listened to differing viewpoints calmly when the issue was discussed in a city council meeting in January. "As strong as the convictions were on both sides, they were expressed in a tone of mutual respect," Montgomery reports. But still, some residents were surprised by their neighbors' viewpoints on the statue. As in other communities, some white residents wanted the statue restored because they believe it has historical value. Phillip Spence told Montgomery that the statue "is not anything that glorifies slavery. It’s just to remember people who died. You always want to remember your ancestors."

But "to hear white people wax eloquent about the old soldier was a stunning revelation for their black neighbors," Montgomery writes. Former civil rights activist Annye Braxton told him that, to her, the statue means bigotry. "If we are the City of the People, it represents an exclusion of my people. And if we are the City of the People, I think we should be included in the monument. Put Dr. King up there. Put President Obama up there, along with your Confederate soldier." African American barber Reginald Gracie bemoaned the fact that the accident brought the whole issue to the forefront. "You find out the spirit that flows through that monument is still flowing through these people today. All these years you say this should be a model city as far as race relations are concerned, but you want to erect the one thing that keeps us divided?"

African Americans' feelings about the statue surprised many of their white neighbors. Kirk Booker, the white operations director of the Marengo County Historical Society, said the revelation was "a little eye-opening." Some white residents couldn't understand why their African American neighbors had never spoken up before if they disliked the monument. Black city council member Charles Jones Jr. said white citizens are learning that "there are some things that we suppressed," and that suppression was one reason Demopolis is able to function as a town where people of different races get along, at least on the surface.

A group that spent the night in an old slave cabin and some
friends made a foot circle during a next-day visit to the Safe
House Black History Museum in nearby Greensboro, Ala.

But residents are still trying to find their way. "I don’t know what it is about this town, but at the end of the day, we try to make it happen, make it work," Jones told Montgomery. "Yeah, there’s still some socioeconomic oppression going on, but at the end of the day, in this town we try to get along. . . . We’ve seen the all-white town, we’ve seen the all-black town, and we don’t like either of those. We like our 50-50 mix."

The issue remains unresolved. The statue is considered to be beyond repair. In April, the council voted to replace it with an obelisk honoring the dead in all wars. But in May 2017, Alabama passed a law forbidding the altering of any public monuments older than 39 years (a law that arguably seeks to specifically preserve Confederate monuments). Some residents said that the law means the statue should be replaced, but others said the law does not apply to a statue that was knocked down before the law passed. The council asked—and is still waiting for—an opinion from state Attorney General Steve Marshall, a Republican appointed early this year.

The monument today (Washington Post photo, and above, by Jahi Chikwendiu)

Judge-historian defends Confederate monuments, says race problems run deeper than stone

Kentucky Supreme Court
Justice Bill Cunningham

Debate about the memorials to Confederate fighters continues to spread across the South.

A 16-foot bronze statue of Gen. Robert E. Lee, a fixture in New Orleans for 133 years, was torn down May 19. The next day, one of West Kentucky's most respected residents, Supreme Court Justice Bill Cunningham, stood at a Murray monument dedicated to Lee, defending Southern Civil War heritage and criticizing what he called revisionist history and "monument marauders," Joshua Roberts reports for The Paducah Sun.

"How long will he stand?" Cunningham said to about 100 people gathered May 20 for the 100th anniversary of the Lee monument outside the Calloway County Courthouse in the county with Kentucky's southernmost point. "The great men and women of 100 years ago were in the business of constructing monuments of appreciation. The lesser men and women of today are in the business of tearing them down. . . . We have moved in 100 years from proudly dedicating this monument in the full light of the noon day to tearing down monuments under the cloak of darkness and police protection. We have moved in 100 years from a generation of appreciation to a generation of historical amnesia."

Cunningham, 72, has long championed equal rights, and one of his books, A Distant Light, is about racial injustice in Western Kentucky. "Based on Cunningham's resumé, background, and public and private remarks, the racially insensitive label applied to many pro-Southern voices doesn't fit the justice," Roberts writes.

Cunningham told Roberts, "I don't have to apologize to anyone (about) my position on race. I am very depressed that after 50 years from our civil-rights laws, race is still an issue in this country, and our poor brothers and sisters of color, in general, are still living in such social and economic conditions." He added that the country's problems with race relations are bigger than the polarizing issue of Civil War monuments. "How many black doctors, lawyers, insurance salesmen, bankers, and school superintendents do we have in West Kentucky?" Cunningham asked. "Meanwhile, we worry about monuments made of stone which are easily destroyed instead of taking on the bigger issues not so easy to resolve."

Campaigns mounting in rural South to revive Confederate flag

While 2015 saw some areas in the South campaigning—often successfully—to have Confederate flags taken down from government and university buildings and removed from state flags, heritage supporters have been working to lobby legislators and prepare lawsuits "to restore or maintain Confederate monuments," Cameron McWhirter reports for The Wall Street Journal. (AP photo: Confederate flag removed from South Carolina Capitol on July 10, 2015)

"Confederate heritage groups say that membership and donations are up; and Confederate flags unfurled on trucks or waving in front of homes remain a common sight across much of the rural South," McWhirter writes. "Dewey Barber, owner of Confederate flag retailer Dixie Outfitters, in Odum, Ga., said sales have 'overwhelmed' his company last summer and fall. Many flags are out of stock as suppliers rush to fill orders, he said."

The South is one of the fastest growing regions in the U.S., McWhirter writes. The 11 states that made up the Confederacy—Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia—have increased in population from 84.2 million in 2000 to 102 million in 2014, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That's an increase of 21 percent, compared with a 13 percent overall U.S. growth rate. "Southern states’ ethnic and racial composition has evolved significantly, with black, Hispanic and Asian minorities growing." (Read more)

Judge removes portrait of Confederate general and town's namesake, saying it promotes inequality

A judge in southern Virginia announced on Tuesday that he has removed the portrait of a Confederate general from the courthouse in a town named for the general, saying the courthouse has to remain a neutral location, Ben Williams reports for the Martinsville Bulletin. Judge Martin F. Clark Jr. said that on Aug. 19 he removed the portrait of Confederate Gen. J.E.B. Stuart from the Patrick County Circuit Court’s room in Stuart (Best Places map).

Clark wrote in a statement: “The courtroom should be a place every litigant and spectator finds fair and utterly neutral. In my estimation, the portrait of a uniformed Confederate general—and a slave owner himself—does not comport with that essential standard.” Clark said it is his "duty as a judge to provide a trial setting that is perceived by all participants as fair, neutral and without so much as a hint of prejudice." He wrote, "Confederate symbols are, simply put, offensive to African-Americans, and this reaction is based on fact and clear, straightforward history.”

Clark wrote: “I’m proud to live in Patrick County, proud to live in the South. I’m proud of our music, our food, our literature, our accomplishments in every possible field, our manners and traditions, our sense of connection with our neighbors, our quiet sacrifices, our grit and courage throughout generations, our savvy and intelligence and the rhythms, feel and strength of this slice of the world. That’s my Southern heritage, and it’s far, far distant from the battlefields of the 1860s." (Read more)

PBS to rebroadcast 'The Civil War'; first episode looks at impact of slavery on war

Supporters of the Confederate flag say it represents heritage, not hate, a claim disputed by Civil War historians. The flag has been at the heart of controversy since the June 17 murders of nine African Americans in a historic Charleston, S.C., church and the arrest of a white suspect with ties to hate crimes. Since the shootings, some have called for banning the flag, others have rallied behind it and disputes continue about what the flag means and how the Civil War is taught in classrooms in relation to slavery. (Slaves working in the sweet potato fields on the Hopkinson plantation, South Carolina, 1862)

That makes this the perfect time for PBS to broadcast a completely restored version of the nine-part series, "The Civil War," by Ken Burns. The series, which begins airing on Sept. 7, will offer a great opportunity for rural newspapers to write about the war and get lively discussions going in the community about what it means locally and nationally.

The first episode, "The Cause," gets right to the heart of the impact historians believe slavery had on the war. Here's a description of the episode: "Beginning with a searing indictment of slavery, this first episode dramatically evokes the causes of the war, from the Cotton Kingdom of the South to the northern abolitionists who opposed it. Here are the burning questions of Union and states' rights, John Brown at Harpers Ferry, the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860, the firing on Fort Sumter and the jubilant rush to arms on both sides. Along the way the series' major figures are introduced: Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses S. Grant and a host of lesser-known but equally vivid characters. The episode comes to a climax with the disastrous Union defeat at Manassas, Va., where both sides learn it is to be a very long war."

Hate groups foes of civil rights have misused Confederate battle flag, Civil War historian says

Misuse of what people call the Confederate flag by white racist groups over the past 75 years has changed the flag's meaning and tarnished its historical significance, opines William C. Davis, former executive director of the Virginia Center for Civil War Studies at Virginia Tech University, for The Wall Street Journal. The flag has received much publicity lately in the wake of the murders of nine African Americans at a historic Charleston church and the arrest of a white suspect with ties to hate groups. Many people have called for Confederate symbols to be removed from official buildings, and last Friday the flag was taken down from the South Carolina statehouse.

Here is an excerpt from Davis's column: 

William C. Davis

In fact, what is popularly known as 'the Confederate flag' never flew over Confederate capitols or public buildings, where different banners reigned. Rather, this emblem brought down on Friday was the Confederate 'battle flag,' designed to be carried at the head of a regiment and used as its rallying point in battle, where the flag’s blue St. Andrew’s cross on a field of brilliant red might stand out through the smoke of battle.

As such, it primarily stood for a unit’s pride in its valor in action, though all of the Confederacy’s symbols naturally carried an intrinsic affirmation of its foundational tenets, including the perpetuation of slavery. After the Union victory in 1865, those battle flags not surrendered, buried, thrown into rivers or cut up as souvenirs went home to quiet repose in closets, attics and, later, museums.

There they remained for decades, undisturbed and in the main undisturbing despite the unhappy meaning still attached to them, their image even protected by veterans’ groups from inappropriate political or commercial use.

But that all ended in the 1940s, when opponents of the emerging civil-rights movement raised the old banner for a new battle. Soon, [some] former Confederate states incorporated it into their state flags, and militant white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan began deploying it as a symbol of resistance to integration and voting rights. The worst proponents of white supremacy displayed that emblem while committing unspeakable violence against African-Americans and white supporters of civil rights. They still do: Witness Charleston.

Southern 'heritage' groups who oppose removing the battle flag are reluctant to acknowledge that this same dynamic has tainted their cherished emblem. But it has. Whatever the flag meant from 1865 to 1940, the flag’s misuse by a white minority of outspokenly bigoted and often violent people has indelibly shifted that meaning.

It is now remembered around the world with images of defiant governors standing in schoolhouse doors, with the snapping dogs of Birmingham, with police barricades to keep black youths out of classrooms, with beatings and lynchings in the night, with churches set ablaze, with fear, intimidation, hatred and the constant reminder that the descendants of slaves were not welcome in their own country.

The argument that the battle flag is displayed only as a symbol of pride in Southern heritage loses force when one recalls that while Florida, Alabama and Mississippi added elements of the banner to their flags around the turn of the last century, Georgia incorporated the battle emblem into its state flag only in 1956, and South Carolina began flying the battle flag over its state house as late as 1961. Both were unequivocal declarations of defiance to desegregation and the civil-rights movement.

Defenders of the battle flag often further assert that Southern secession and the resultant Civil War had little or nothing to do with slavery, arguing that only a tiny fraction of people in the seceding states—usually cited as 3 percent to 6 percent—actually owned slaves. Thus, they say, the flag’s opponents are wrong to condemn it is a symbol of slavery and oppression.

But somebody owned the 3.5 million slaves in the Confederate states in 1861. In fact, census records reveal that 31 percent of all Confederate households held one or more slaves. The same records show that on farms large enough to avail themselves of slave labor, as many as 70 percent of planters owned their workers. Such ownership defined wealth and social status, regional culture and economic survival.

Civil War education varies by state; new Texas textbooks downplay slavery's role in war

One-hundred-fifty years after the American Civil War ended and slavery was abolished, debate over the Confederate flag had heated up in some southern states, with some people calling the flag racist and others citing its historical significance. This brings up an interesting topic concerning how U.S. schools approach teaching students about the Civil War.

In Texas, five million public school students this fall will begin using social studies textbooks that say the Civil War "was caused by 'sectionalism, states’ rights and slavery'—written deliberately in that order to telegraph slavery’s secondary role in driving the conflict, according to some members of the state board of education," Emma Brown reports for The Washington Post. "The state’s guidelines for teaching American history also do not mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws."

Pat Hardy, a Republican board member when the board adopted the standards in 2010, called slavery "a side issue to the Civil War," Brown writes. Hardy told her, “There would be those who would say the reason for the Civil War was over slavery. No. It was over states’ rights.”

That attitude has caused concern, especially since the states' rights the Confederacy was trying to protect included the right to own slaves, Brown writes. Dan Quinn of the Texas Freedom Network, "a left-leaning advocacy organization that has been critical of the state’s academic standards in social studies," told Brown, “It’s the obvious question, it seems to me. Not only are we worried about the flags and statues and all that, but what the hell are kids learning?”

The problem is that different people view the Civil War differently, Brown writes. "Nowhere is the rejection of slavery’s central role more apparent than in Texas, where elected members of the state board of education revised state social studies standards in 2010 to correct for what they said was a liberal slant."

Standards include reading "the speech Jefferson Davis gave when he was inaugurated president of the Confederate States of America, an address that does not mention slavery," Brown writes. "But students are not required to read a famous speech by Alexander Stephens, Davis’s vice president, in which he explained that the South’s desire to preserve slavery was the cornerstone of its new government and 'the immediate cause of the late rupture and present revolution.'”

Rod Paige, a Republican "who served as education secretary under President George W. Bush, was among those who criticized the Texas board for minimizing difficult parts of the nation’s past," Brown writes. Paige told her, “I’m of the view that the history of slavery and civil rights are dominant elements of our history and have shaped who we are today. We may not like our history, but it’s history.” (Read more)

College named after Robert E. Lee removes Confederate flags after students complain

A college named after Robert E. Lee has removed Confederate flags from its campus after law students "complained because they had to pledge an honor code in the presence of the flags, something they said glorified Lee’s actions," Carmen Forman reports for The Roanoke Times. Kenneth Ruscio, president of Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., said Wednesday in his convocation speech that all flags had been removed as "a way of building a community of diverse views and respect on campus." Lee was president of the school when it was named Washington College. The school was renamed after Lee's death. (Times photo by Stephanie Klein-Davis: Confederate flags on campus)

Ruscio said he had support from the Lee family, citing a letter he received from Lee's great grandson Robert E. Lee IV, which said: “It is clear to me that president Lee would wholeheartedly support your goals of making Washington and Lee a welcoming environment for all students who choose to come there today. As a proud alumnus, I, too, support those goals. In my view, removing the flags from the statuary chamber is overdue. I am proud of my alma mater. I am certain that my great-grandfather would be proud of the institution he once led.”

While retaining the flags had received little support on campus, the same can't be said of residents of the town of 7,000, Forman writes. Brandon Dorsey, commander of Camp 1296 of the Lexington-based Stonewall Brigade of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, "said it doesn’t matter that a distant relative of Robert E. Lee supported taking down the flags because it wasn’t right in the first place. To him, Lee deserves to have flags of the nation he fought for hang in a building memorializing him."

Dorsey told Forman, “It’s disrespectful. There wouldn’t be a Washington and Lee University if there hadn’t been a Robert E. Lee. He deserves to have that recognition remain there. Just because you have a family member that takes a position doesn’t mean that has any reflection on the father or grandfather’s views. It’s neat that he’s a descendant, but he didn’t know Robert E. Lee.” (Read more)

Southerners have misled nation for a century about cause of Civil War; time to set record straight

By Al Cross, director, Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues

Friday The Rural Blog picked up an excerpt from Tracy Thompson's new book, The New Mind of the South, about a Clarksdale, Miss., tourist court comprising plantation shacks. Another part of the book is much more important. It explains why more Americans believe the Southern-generated myth that the concept of states' rights was the cause of the Civil War, rather than slavery. "Thompson’s analysis is most incisive and heartfelt" on this point, J. Bryan Lowder writes in Slate.

This is not an arcane, academic argument. It is about facing the fundamental facts about our country, and its fundamental divider, race. And those facts are especially important to confront right now because we have a black president and are going through the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, a term some in the South still refuse to use. "To call it a Civil War was to concede that secession was impossible and/or unconstitutional," Thompson (above), who was raised in Georgia, writes in the book. (Photo by Dayna Smith)

The 3,940-word book excerpt in Salon carries an extreme headline, "The South still lies about the Civil War," but as someone who was born, raised and lived all my life in slave states, I find it a compelling account of how Confederate veterans, their descendants and their allies perpetuated the myth, often with the help of Northerners who thought it would encourage regional reconciliation, and how it invaded textbooks and the public mind. To read it, click here.

Rural places in Ky., slave state that didn't secede but later joined the losers, remember Civil War

Exactly 150 years ago right now, the United States of America were (the prevailing verb then) becoming less united. The Deep South states had formed the Confederate States of America, and the Civil War was coming. Observances of the war's sesquicentennial have already begun, and are especially thought-provoking during Black History Month in Kentucky, a slave state that was the birth place of both wartime presidents and remained in the Union but aligned itself with the defeated South after the war.

In the last two days in Western Kentucky, which was the state's most Confederate-sympathetic area, local observances in rural places have helped bridge a racial divide that still exists in some ways.

Yesterday, in Morganfield, an expert on Frederick Douglass, local native Michael Crutcher Sr., portrayed the early civil-rights leader meeting with Abraham Lincoln, played by Jim Sayre. Lincoln hosted Douglass at the White House in 1863, after issuing the Emancipation Proclamation. Douglass is not known to have visited Morganfield, but Lincoln did in 1840, as a presidential elector in nearby Illinois for Kentuckian Henry Clay. "Crutcher remarked at the close of his discussion with Sayre's Lincoln that the friendship between the two men was at that time quite politically incorrect," reports Victoria Grabner of The Gleaner in Henderson. (Gleaner photo by Mike Lawrence) The observance was part of the bicentennial of Union County, which was named in 1811 after "the united desire of its residents to form a new county," according to Kentucky Place Names by Robert Rennick.

At the Fairview historic site that is the birthplace of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, "Two female African American preachers would not contain their joy Friday when a small group gathered for a black history lesson" from The Female Re-Enactors of Distinction, a group affiliated with the Civil War Museum in Washington, D.C., reports Jennifer P. Brown of the Kentucky New Era in Hopkinsville. FREED members dress in period costumes and use period speech to portray African Americans from the era. (Read more, subscription required)

Data on dates show decline of Iraqi agriculture

"In Iraq, one of the places where agriculture was developed more than 7,000 years ago, there are increasing doubts about whether it makes much sense to grow ... much of anything," Timothy Williams reports for The New York Times. "Wars, sanctions, poor management, international competition and disinvestment" have left the country's agriculture "a shadow of its former self," and the same is true for manufacturing. (Times photo by Joseph Sywenkyj: A worker shakes sand from green dates near Baghdad)

"The agricultural industry has been particularly damaged during the past few years, a situation perhaps nowhere more apparent than in the country’s once bountiful date orchards," Williams writes. "Date palms have been left to die for lack of water, and fungi and pests have ruined thousands of tons of fruit because the country has only three crop-dusting airplanes and three qualified pilots. American military approval is still needed to fly."

The decline of dates has had big ramifications. The lack of work for young men fed insurgencies, and "As growers have abandoned farms, the orchards that had once formed a lush green ring around Baghdad have shrunk, causing more frequent sandstorms in the capital this summer and higher rates of asthma and other respiratory illnesses," Williams reports. It's a sad tale that reminds us of the fundamental nature of farming in civilization, proven in the same valley of the Tigris and Euphrates so long ago. And the story also has some data on dates that we bet you didn't know.

Confederacy museum, struggling to find a new site, plans to split into three

Struggling from "image and financial problems," the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Va., is making another attempt to preserve its collection with a plan to create exhibits at three battlefield sites in Virginia, reports Neely Tucker of The Washington Post. (Photo of "The White House of the Confederacy" by Steve Helber, Associated Press.)

The $15 million plan would divide the collection of the 117-year-old museum among rural sites at Chancellorsville, Appomattox and a third battlefield to be determined, Tucker writes. The battlefield exhibits would open by 2011, while the current museum would close, officials told Tucker. The "White House of the Confederacy," the home and headquarters of CSA President Jefferson Davis during the Civil War, would stay open. But funding for the project has not been secured.

"Our mission is to use our artifact collection to educate the public, and you have to get people to see the stuff in order to do that," S. Waite Rawls III, the museum's executive director, told Tucker.

Earlier this year, the museum sought to move its entire collection to a new location, and looked at 10 sites, all of which remained confidential except Lexington, Va., where the city council approved the idea 4-2 after hearing opposition from African Americans. The Rockbridge Weekly writes that "opponents of the Museum of the Confederacy locating in Lexington must be breathing a sigh of relief this week." That article goes on to say that "substantial opposition developed" as Lexington sought to lure the museum.

The museum's current site, next to the "White House of the Confederacy," has been surrounded by a new medical complex, and it is large enough to display only 10 percent of the museum's total collection of about 14,000 artifacts, The Roanoke Times reports. With the change in the neighborhood and the completion of the more politically correct American Civil War Center, attendance has dropped from a peak of 91,000 annually to 44,000 last year, the Associated Press reports. An audit also revealed the museum's endowment had been drained to cover operating costs, The Washington Post reports.