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Knocked out another past due bookspin. Doing not too shabby. But I need something rather mindless next. 🤔

This was a challenge to read due to the topic and reading about the seemingly endless ways that Lee was canonized but it highlighted many places and ways that the Lost Cause continues to be perpetuated.

This was really good. Ty coming to terms with the way he was raised as a "southern gentleman" and racist views. #audio #bookspinbingo square

Shown: each Sunday, Charleston (SC) BLM faces down Confederates.

If you‘ve read this book, congrats…you‘ve read some critical race theory! I grew up here in the south, and I was never taught the truth. Yet everywhere you look, there are painful reminders that the south holds onto, with pride. This was such a heart breaking book but it‘s one everyone should read. We must dismantle white supremacy once and for all lest it destroy us. #BLM

Ask yourself what the hell Robert E. Lee is doing in stained glass windows, in a TX church. The answer, is the cult of white supremacy.

This is horrible. The windows were supposed to be taken down last year, but I don‘t know the update as of right now.

SHAME.

You can‘t not see it. You can‘t.

Racism is the virus in the American dirt, infecting everything and everyone. To combat racism, we must do more than acknowledge the history of white supremacy. Policies must change. Yet, an understanding of history remains the foundation. The only way to prevent a racist future is to first understand our racist past.

Americans can and will confront our past, survive, and thrive. We will make a better, more inclusive society for our children and our grandchildren. I believe in this country.

Because of our decentralized governance system, we will never have a single solution to the problem of Confederate memorialization. Nor will we ever have a single solution to fix the legacy, the immorality, of slavery and segregation. To create a more just society, we must start by studying our past. If we want to know where to go, we must know where we‘ve been.

To those who say I am trying to change history, they should realize that the history of Confederate monuments represents a racist legacy all people should abhor.

As W.E.B. Du Bois said in 1928, “Robert E. Lee led a bloody war to perpetuate slavery.”

No need to explain why the South had no African American soldiers. The Confederates had fewer forces because their cause was so flawed. Yet the numerical disadvantage was never as great as Lee argued. The United States won because they were better.

We should also remember that Lee had African Americans in his army, as enslaved servants and workers, not soldiers. The Army of Northern Virginia hired thousands of enslaved workers from owners to dig fortifications and bury bodies. The South used enslaved workers to free more white men for combat.

When Lee‘s army left PA after its ignoble defeat at Gettysburg, they took hundreds of African Americans with them. But not everyone. The US Army lieutenant Chester Leach reported that one African American man accepted torture, mutilation, and eventual death at the Pennsylvania border rather than submit to enslavement in Virginia.

As the Confederate army began to plan for an invasion into PA, the Emancipation Proclamation was part of their calculus. Lee‘s army captured hundreds of African Americans, both emancipated freedmen and free Black civilians, for forced enslavement in the South. The total number might have approached a thousand. No military necessity demanded the kidnapping. The purpose was racial control through violence, the prospect of booty, and retaliation.

During the war, Lee‘s actions and words about enslaved people also show that he fought the war to maintain slavery. On January 10, 1863, Lee wrote to the Confederate secretary of war after the publication of the Emancipation Proclamation, calling it savage and brutal policy…which leaves us no alternative but success or degradation worse than death, if we would save the honor of our families from pollution, our social system from destruction.

I agree with Fredrick Douglas, who said, using all caps, “The Constitution is a GLORIOUS LIBERTY DOCUMENT.” I know our country is flawed. Nevertheless, I believe in the United States of America. I‘ve spent two-thirds of my life in its service. Despite the systemic racism throughout the history of this country, I believe in the promise of America. As a US Army soldier, I believe the Constitution is worth defending. I love my country.

Even after defeat at Gettysburg, white southerners called him “the Invincible Lee.” The South stayed in the war for four years, ensuring the destruction of the its infrastructure, not to mention the horrific bloodletting. Nearly 3 out of 4 of Lee‘s soldiers either were killed, died of disease, were wounded, captured, or were discharged as disabled. In the last year of the war, Lee‘s army killed or wounded 127,000 US Army soldiers.

John Brown Gordon told his fellow white Georgians to never apologize nor ever admit that slavery was wrong; “take the position everywhere that it [slavery] is morally, socially, and politically right—and that it is, in truth, the hand-maid of liberty.”

Tell me this asshole. How is it Liberty to enslave other human beings?!

Brown was another Confederate asshole and Fort Gordon is named after him.

Our men will be compelled to wander like vagabonds all over the earth; and as for our women, the horrors of their state we cannot contemplate in imagination. That is the fate which abolition will bring upon the white race…We will be completely exterminated, and the land will be left in the possession of the blacks, and then it will go back to a wilderness and become another Africa. —Henry. L. Benning

Fort Benning was named after this asshole!

I had no idea about the Oath‘s origins. The oath we take is a Civil War, really a War of the Rebellion, oath. Worried about traders in their midst, Congress passed a law requiring a loyalty oath to almost everyone who had a federal job, including the military. The “Ironclad Test Oath” became law in 1862. Read more here: https://www.visitthecapitol.gov/exhibitions/timeline/lawmakers-loyalty-and-ironc...

When I looked at the sanctuary of Lee Chapel, I saw the altar, the holy table. Except that on top of the table lay Robert E Lee‘s statue. Robert E Lee was God, and his Confederate cause was the one true religion.

OMG😱😱😱🤯🤯🤯😩😩😩nothing screams white supremacy more!

When people have no political outlet nor means of changing a racist society, rioting is their only voice.

A Confederate monument had the same purpose as lynching: enforce white supremacy. It is no coincidence that most Confederate monuments went up between 1890 and 1920, the same period that lynching peaked in the south. Lynching and Confederate monuments served to tell African-Americans that they were second-class citizens.

(We don‘t see statues of Nazis for ‘heritage‘—RIGHT???!!!)

The only way to argue for slavery, then or now, is to believe that the enslaved weren‘t real human beings. That the lives of those who had darker skin had less worth; that the color of skin made the difference between human and not quite human.

The Civil War left between 650,000 and 750,000 dead because the Confederates fought to create a slave republic based on a morally bankrupt ideology of white supremacy.

It‘s not heritage, it‘s hate. 💔

We should stop calling these places plantations and start calling them by a more accurate name—enslaved labor farms. Accurate language can help us destroy the lies of the Lost Cause.

SC led the charge to secession with its declaration on December 20, 1860, stating the reason it left the US was “the increasing hostility on the part of the non-slave holding states to the institution of slavery.” MISS seceded, arguing that “our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest in the world.” Secessionists argued that slavery was a positive good for both enslaved & slave owners.

Margaret Mitchell‘s Gone With the Wind has all the elements of that terrible Lost Cause myth. She argued that the Confederate cause was just. For her, the war wasn‘t fought over slavery but to protect the land. The reality, and there are facts, told a different story. Confederate states seceded to protect and expand their peculiar institution of slavery.

This lie came at a horrible, deadly , impossible cost to the nation, a cost we are still paying today. The Lost Cause created a flawed memory of the Civil War, a lie that formed the ideological foundation for white supremacy and Jim Crow laws, which used violent terror and de jure segregation to enforce racial control.

The four flags of the Confederacy.
1. Stars & Bars
2. Stainless Banner
3. Blood-Stained Banner
4. Battle Flag.

THEY ALL SUCK🔥🔥🔥🖕🏻🖕🏻🖕🏻

It was called the Stainless Banner. William T. Thompson described the flag accurately as “The White Man‘s Flag. As a people we are fighting to maintain the Heaven-ordained supremacy of the white man over the inferior or colored race; a white flag would thus be emblematical of our cause.” Yes, the Confederacy proclaimed its racism proudly.

Light it up then🔥🔥🔥#fuckracism

Told by a west point historian who grew up in Virginia and Georgia revering Lee, he takes a military historian‘s eye to Lee‘s legacy and confronts his own past as someone who held Lee up as a hero. Good perspective on how the civil war used to be taught, and shines a light on origins of confederate monuments, the myth of Lee, and southern military officials who chose to stay loyal to the union.

“The America I love.” This story tore my heart to pieces in the best way. This is the America we should be striving for; where opportunity is available to everyone, where the promise of the country is shared equally among all races and creeds. This is the America that will be great - not the one that red hats want to see. #roberteleeandme #tyseidule #civilwar #militaryhistory #americanhistory #knowbetterdobetter

I‘m only a chapter in, but General Seidule is thoughtful, scholarly, eloquent, and unflinchingly, searingly honest. There are A LOT of people who could benefit from reading this... #roberteleeandme #tyseidule #westpointprofessor #unitedstatesarmy #militaryhistory #militaryscholar #brigadiergeneralseidule #themythofthelostcause #civilwar #confederacy #whitesupremacy