The Confederacy and its statues are may be a glorious heritage for some, but a galling reminder of degradations for others.
Have you ever had someone keep poking his or her finger in your eye? Everywhere you look – there is that finger! If taking down the statues of men and woman who supported the Confederacy, achieves any healing in the wounds that racism caused — take them down.
But teach its history! Never forget the Confederacy, and the history, national and international, that culminated in its rise and fall.
Never Forget:
- How delusional even the church became in its justification of the enslavement of millions of Africans, and later segregation of United States citizens.
- What the prospect of money or easy remedies to social problems did to both races – white and black.
- The history of what the South did to Africans and what the North also supported for the money they made off the slave trade. Molasses to Rum — 1776
- The European nations who prospered, and the Africans who aided and abetted slavers. This is a reality we must not forget.
- The cost to end slavery – 640,000+ lives.
- The grotesqueness of racial segregation – its distortions linger, threatening, weakening America.
- The history of American slavery and the War Between the States. Remember this epoch with repentance and remorse.
- The Confederacy lost the war. In my opinion because of God’s mercy – and the Union won because of His grace.
- The breath-taking mansions in the Old South were possible because some humans enslaved and badly treated other human beings. A few people had what they had because of the horror we did not stop for three centuries. And continued in shocking ways for 100+ years after the Civil War. (Read Twelve Years a Slave, the autobiography of Frederick Douglass, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and The Minister’s Wooing)
- Wm. Wilberforce and John Newton, and the British Navy who intercepted slave ships. Why were Americans so slow?
And never forget how quickly and easily our generation denied constitutional protection to the unborn.