Josiah Norton, my great-great-great-grandfather, fought for the Confederacy. He was murdered during the war by bushwhackers sympathetic to the Union. Jennie, my great-great-great-grandmother, picked the kids up afterward and moved from Kentucky to Arkansas.
The Nortons have been here ever since.
Follow my grandmother's side of the family, the Edmistons, and my ancestors have been in Arkansas since before we were a state. That is to say, my family is Southern. I'm Southern. I am a white male Southerner.
In the wake of events in Charleston, this creates an uncomfortable cognitive dissonance. How, in these times, do I balance recognizing my history and heritage without purporting to support racism, xenophobia, or hatred?
This occurs as South Carolina has taken the courageous first steps of removing the flag of the Confederacy from its Capitol. Alabama's Gov. Robert Bentley also ordered the removal of the flags from outside the Capitol building in Montgomery, the first capitol of the Confederate States of America, mind you. Georgia has moved to redesign its vanity license plates that prominently feature the battle flag.
More locally, the Fort Smith School Board met as a committee of the whole recently to pass a motion to phase out Southside's "Dixie" fight song and the Rebel mascot by the 2015-2016 and 2016-2017 school years, respectively.
Our own Wal-Mart, along with Amazon, eBay and Sears, will no longer be selling the flag of the Confederacy.
These are good first steps to making the South and our state more inclusive for everyone, not just folks like me. Still, we must do more.
We must remove Robert E. Lee from the state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
This is not about forgetting or tossing aside our heritage. It's about remembering another Southerner, Pastor King, and celebrating the progress we've made on racial inequality and injustice.
I do not doubt the reasons behind honoring Lee. I understand the Lost Cause interpretation of the war, of noting states' rights and economics, of pointing to the defeat of the traditional Southern way of life. Lee himself recognized that "slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil."
But I believe there is no denying that, even if the Civil War was about economics, the Southern economy was resting on the subjugation of our fellow Americans and the Confederacy committed treason to try to sustain it.
We can retain our Southern pride, but we must remember the terror and injustices of our past and acknowledge the pain of imagery. History can still be preserved, as state Rep. Nate Bell proposed in his failed bill this past session that would have removed Lee from Martin Luther King Day and designated November 30th as Southern Heritage Day to honor both Lee and Confederate general and Arkansan Patrick Cleburne.
As Gov. Asa Hutchinson recently said in regard to the Confederate flag, we must ensure that we don't have "symbols in our society that are offensive to a segment and arouse racial division."
That too means removing the painful icons and implicit support by our state government for the rebel army on the day meant to pay respects to Dr. King, peace, and reconciliation. Lee wrote later in his life that it was "wiser moreover not to keep open the sores of war."
This is not to say the fight finishes with imagery. This is just a start. As a society, we must address inequality of opportunity, wealth, education, and rights. There is much more to be done.
That's the best way to honor our heritage.
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Mike Norton, a native of Lincoln, is a 2013 University of Arkansas graduate currently studying politics at the University of Oxford as a Marshall Scholar.
Editorial on 07/02/2015