Our ancestors and us

A substantive discussion unfolds in the matter of the Confederacy and its lingering symbolic celebration.

An essay published in this newspaper Sunday, written by author-lawyer Phillip McMath of Little Rock, presented the inevitable nuance of any fair consideration of history: The North wasn't all good and the South wasn't all bad. And Reconstruction was a colossal failure that haunts the South still.

Robert E. Lee exuded uncommon nobility and had freed his own slaves before the Civil War. Still, he took and led the wrong side. Then he fully accepted defeat and moved on.

As McMath wrote, the post-war Lee took communion beside a black man and encouraged bitter Southerners to embrace one America, not lingering sectional division.

McMath left readers to form their own conclusions from his presentation of historical fact and perspective.


So here are my conclusions: A Confederate general can be worthy of personal admiration and yet be unalterably affiliated with a shamefully misbegotten cause--one that was underpinned by a desire to continue holding black people in bondage, and one that cries out to be studied, remembered, accepted, understood, lamented, rejected and overcome.

But it is a cause that should not be honored or celebrated, least of all by people waving an old battle flag 150 years later. By that behavior they celebrate secession from a great and free country. And they endorse racism and inhumanity.

Then there was a guest column on this page last week from a direct descendant of a Confederate soldier who argued that we would be seeking to "erase" history--his own ancestry, mainly--if we dismantled the lingering symbols of the Confederacy.

History shouldn't and can't be erased. But no one is talking about changing or deleting it. We're talking about achieving command of it in hopes of not repeating it.

We're talking about getting over it.

We don't dishonor our ancestors by knowing and admitting they were wrong. In our fair consideration of context, we can understand they were creatures of their time and place.

We dishonor only ourselves if we can't adapt to our own time and place--if we insist on being creatures of their time rather than ours.

What we need is less ancestral egocentrism and more personal evolution.

I was raised a white-flight Little Rock kid of the 1950s and '60s. My own family fled from the integrating city schools to the still-segregated surrounding county schools. But by the '70s my dad was advocating racial integration of the little downtown church he attended and watching mournfully as the struggling congregation died from the tragically bitter division of that simple Christian notion.

He evolved. So should I. So should we all.

I love and honor my ancestors and their memory. But I don't honor the ugly local resistance to racial integration of Little Rock Central High School. I wave no symbol of it. I worship no monument to it.

I extol instead the museum on Park Street that reveals and remembers it. I prefer the statues honoring the brave youths oppressed by it.

Your own children and grandchildren can someday love you and honor your memory while knowing and accepting that you were bigoted against gay people. They will not dishonor you when they reject that bigotry.

They will have evolved into what you would have been if you'd come along later.

So now the Confederacy debate seems itself to be evolving, moving to a discussion not of whether we should remove symbols, but of how thoroughly.

There is widely emerging agreement that a state shouldn't fly the Rebel flag at its Capitol. But there is some balking, for example, at changing the name of Little Rock's Confederate Boulevard.

It was named for a Confederate soldiers' rest home. And it runs past a Confederate soldiers' cemetery.

Some ask: Can't we leave that much alone? Can't we leave the dead undisturbed?

My answer is that we should and must leave dead soldiers undisturbed--and properly remembered and respected--in their Confederate cemetery. But the public city street running past that cemetery--and through a minority neighborhood--could be better named for something more respectful to people now alive.

In this case you can best honor the dead in memorials and monuments, and you can best respect the living by putting a less offensive name on the path they take to work and school and church.

And we can all best honor our ancestors by striving to be better than they were.

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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 07/16/2015

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