In a soaring eulogy to the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, President Barack Obama spoke of grace’s power to heal, the nation’s enduring racial divide, and how last week’s killings in Emanuel AME Church offered a chance for a grieving country “to find our best selves.”
The president’s 38-minute oratory Friday reached deep into history, probing the lingering wounds of slavery and desegregation while celebrating Pinckney’s long-standing devotion to his ministry and the poor.
Bringing the crowd to its feet time and again, Obama called for continued efforts to furl the Confederate battle flag.
He decried the nation’s blindness “to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts on us.”
And, in one of the eulogy’s most surprising moments, he paused for eight seconds, looked down somberly, and sang “Amazing Grace.”
After the services, Obama, his wife, Michelle, Vice President Joe Biden, and his wife, Jill, had private meetings with the victims’ families.
Malcolm Graham, a former North Carolina state senator and brother of victim Cynthia Hurd, said the tone was solemn. “It was yet another citizen voicing his concern for us,” Graham said. But, “In this case, it was the president of the United States. We felt real good about him doing that.” Chris Singleton, the son of Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, said the meeting was “breathtaking.”
It was the first time Obama has visited Charleston since his first presidential campaign in 2008. And it came just 10 days after a white gunman was accused of opening fire in a Bible study class at Emanuel AME Church, killing Pinckney and eight others. It also came amid an increasingly heated debate over gun violence and racially charged incidents involving police, including the fatal shooting in April of Walter Scott in North Charleston.
But the mood throughout the services and afterward was joyful, even as the throng left the arena and plunged into the withering June sun. “What I like about the speech is the president didn’t spare the bitter medicine,” said North Charleston minister Nelson Rivers III, a vice president with the National Action Network. “The president went there. He went to the issue of race.”
Packed ‘sanctuary’
Anticipation of the president’s visit was palpable throughout the week, and for many people, the services began hours before first light.
The Rev. Curtis Capers of Summerville was among those first to line up in Marion Square at 3:30 a.m. Three hours later, the line extended from Calhoun Street, up Meeting Street and about 100 yards around on Hutson Street. Capers, pastor of Honey Hill Baptist Church in Cottageville, said he came to pay his respects to Pinckney and other victims. “They were doing what God required them to do,” Capers said of their attendance in a Bible study class. “I believe they were ready to meet their Heavenly Father.”
Hundreds brought water, chairs, umbrellas and other supplies to help them through another hot summer morning until the TD Arena’s doors opened. By 10 a.m., lines outside the arena — steps away from Mother Emanuel — had broken down beyond the police barriers. “The gates of heaven won’t be like this,” a mourner said when he reached the arena gates. “They will be narrower, but there will be fewer.”
At 11 a.m., more than 5,900 people packed the arena, a record according to the College of Charleston, and hundreds of people were turned away. Inside, women in white dresses and men in black suits clapped their hands as a band played a joyful spiritual medley, and then “Amazing Grace.” Organizers handed out programs, which included two poems from Pinckney’s daughters, Eliana and Malana. The Rev. Norvel Goff, the interim pastor of Emanuel AME Church, drew standing ovations for his invocation: “This is no longer the TD Arena. We have transformed it into a sanctuary.”
The tributes began even as Air Force One was in the air and flying toward Charleston. Several dignitaries were introduced, including U.S. Rep. Jim Clyburn and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, both of whom received standing ovations. When a woman yelled “Hillary!” from the audience,” Goff, the presiding elder, reminded everyone that they were in a sanctuary.
Speakers and members of the clergy sat in a long row that stretched across the arena floor. On the far left was a sign: “Wrong Church, Wrong People, Wrong Day.” One by one, the speakers went to the lectern, adorned with a purple church banner. They spoke of the potential of the tragedy to create positive change.
“His sacrifice must lead to reconciliation,” said state Sen. Gerald Malloy, who represents counties in the Pee Dee. “Clementa Pinckney’s last act as a Christian and as a senator was to open his doors to someone he did not know.” The Rev. John R. Bryant, senior bishop of the AME Church, had people on their feet after he said, “Someone should have told that young man … he wanted to start a race war. But he came to the wrong place.”
They stood again when Bryant credited the governor for her bold move to remove the flag from the Statehouse grounds. “Joy comes in the morning,” Bryant said. “Touch the person next to you and say, ‘Good morning.’ ”
Anticipation grew as the speakers went over their allotted time and word spread that the president and vice president had arrived.
‘Things not seen’
Since he was elected the nation’s first African-American president, Obama has been called on frequently to serve as consoler-in-chief: Three months after Obama was sworn in, a man killed 13 people at an immigration center in Binghamton, New York; seven months later, an Army psychiatrist fatally shot 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas; a year later, a 22-year-old opened fire at a Tucson supermarket, killing six and wounding 11, including U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords; six months later, a man shot and killed 12 people in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater; in 2012, a gunman shot 20 first-graders and six adults in Newtown, Conn.
When Obama took the podium Friday afternoon, he quickly introduced the eulogy’s central theme: Pinckney, the president said, was “a man who believed in things not seen, a man who believed there were better days ahead.”
Noting Pinckney’s smile and “reassuring baritone,” Obama described Pinckney’s remarkable career. “He was in the pulpit by 13, pastor by 18, public servant by 23,” and how as a state senator for Allendale, Beaufort, Charleston, Colleton, Hampton and Jasper counties, he “represented a sprawling swath of Lowcountry, a place that has long been one of the most neglected in America, a place still racked by poverty and inadequate schools, a place where children can still go hungry and the sick can go without treatment — a place that needed someone like Clem.”
Pinckney, he added, “embodied a politics that was neither mean nor small. He conducted himself quietly and kindly and diligently.”
Obama then shifted toward the killings and their surprising aftermath. “To the families of the fallen, the nation shares in your grief. Our pain cuts that much deeper because it happened in a church. The church is and always has been the center of the African-American life.”
The president touched on Charleston’s response, led by the families of the victims.
“The alleged killer could never have anticipated how the families would respond,” he said. “Amid unspeakable grief,” they spoke about forgiveness and love. The arena came to its feet, and an organ played a few notes. “Blinded by hatred, he failed to comprehend what Rev. Pinckney so well understood — the power of God’s grace.”
The crowd stood for another ovation as he spoke of Mother Emanuel — “a church built by blacks seeking liberty, burned to the ground because its founders sought to end slavery only to rise up again, a phoenix from these ashes.” Then, he took aim at the Confederate flag.
“For too long, we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred into many of our citizens,” he said, lauding Gov. Nikki Haley’s call to remove the flag from the Statehouse grounds. “As we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than ancestral pride. For many, black and white, that flag was a reminder of systematic oppression and racial subjugation. We see that now.”
He said putting the Confederate flag in its proper place was a first step toward healing the nation’s wounds, but “I don’t think God wants to stop there.” He spoke about how racial bias “can infect us even when we don’t realize it,” drawing one of the biggest cheers when he described the “subtle impulse to call Johnny back for a job interview but not Jamal.”
Near the end, he returned to the personal impact the shootings had on him. “An open heart. That’s what I felt this week. An open heart.” He spoke of grace, and of how “if we can find that grace, anything is possible.” His voice lowered then, and he paused and led the arena in “Amazing Grace.” The crowd erupted in song and cheers. And his voice rose over the cheers as he said,
“Clementa Pinckney found that grace …
“Cynthia Hurd found that grace …
“Susie Jackson found that grace …
“Ethel Lance found that grace …
“DePayne Middleton Doctor found that grace …
“Tywanza Sanders found that grace …
“Daniel L. Simmons Sr. found that grace …
“Sharonda Coleman-Singleton found that grace …
“Myra Thompson found that grace.”
Note: Robert Behre, Glenn Smith, Jennifer Berry Hawes, Hanna Raskin, Brenda Ringe, Christina Elmore and Melissa Boughton and Jeff Hartsell contributed to this report.
Obama speech excerpts
“I cannot claim to have the good fortune to know Reverend Pinckney well. But I did have the pleasure of knowing him and meeting him here in South Carolina, back when we were both a little bit younger. … The first thing I noticed was his graciousness, his smile, his reassuring baritone, his deceptive sense of humor — all qualities that helped him wear so effortlessly a heavy burden of expectation.”
“Cynthia Hurd. Susie Jackson. Ethel Lance. DePayne Middleton-Doctor. Tywanza Sanders. Daniel L. Simmons. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton. Myra Thompson. Good people. Decent people. God-fearing people. People so full of life and so full of kindness. People who ran the race, who persevered. People of great faith.”
“It’s true, a flag did not cause these murders. But as people from all walks of life, Republicans and Democrats, now acknowledge — including Governor Haley, whose recent eloquence on the subject is worthy of praise — as we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride.”
“Over the course of centuries, black churches served as ‘hush harbors’ where slaves could worship in safety; praise houses where their free descendants could gather and shout hallelujah; rest stops for the weary along the Underground Railroad; bunkers for the foot soldiers of the Civil Rights Movement. They have been, and continue to be, community centers where we organize for jobs and justice; places of scholarship and network; places where children are loved and fed and kept out of harm’s way, and told that they are beautiful and smart and taught that they matter.”
“We do not know whether the killer of Reverend Pinckney and eight others knew all of this history. But he surely sensed the meaning of his violent act. … An act that he imagined would incite fear and recrimination; violence and suspicion. An act that he presumed would deepen divisions that trace back to our nation’s original sin. Oh, but God works in mysterious ways. God has different ideas.”
“For too long, we’ve been blind to the unique mayhem that gun violence inflicts upon this nation…. The vast majority of Americans — the majority of gun owners — want to do something about this. We see that now.”
“None of us should believe that a handful of gun safety measures will prevent every tragedy. It will not. People of goodwill will continue to debate the merits of various policies, as our democracy requires — this is a big, raucous place, America is. And there are good people on both sides of these debates. Whatever solutions we find will necessarily be incomplete. But it would be a betrayal of everything Reverend Pinckney stood for, I believe, if we allowed ourselves to slip into a comfortable silence again.”
“The alleged killer could not imagine how the city of Charleston, under the good and wise leadership of Mayor Riley — how the state of South Carolina, how the United States of America would respond — not merely with revulsion at his evil act, but with big-hearted generosity and, more importantly, with a thoughtful introspection and self-examination that we so rarely see in public life.”
“Clem understood … that history can’t be a sword to justify injustice, or a shield against progress, but must be a manual for how to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past — how to break the cycle.”
“What a good man. Sometimes I think that’s the best thing to hope for when you’re eulogized — after all the words and recitations and resumes are read, to just say someone was a good man.”
“Removing the flag from this state’s capitol would not be an act of political correctness; it would not be an insult to the valor of Confederate soldiers. It would simply be an acknowledgment that the cause for which they fought — the cause of slavery — was wrong, the imposition of Jim Crow after the Civil War, the resistance to civil rights for all people was wrong. It would be one step in an honest accounting of America’s history.”
“By taking down that flag, we express God’s grace. But I don’t think God wants us to stop there. For too long, we’ve been blind to the way past injustices continue to shape the present. Perhaps we see that now. Perhaps this tragedy causes us to ask some tough questions about how we can permit so many of our children to languish in poverty, or attend dilapidated schools, or grow up without prospects for a job or for a career.”
“If we can find that grace, anything is possible. If we can tap that grace, everything can change.”
“As a nation, out of this terrible tragedy, God has visited grace upon us, for he has allowed us to see where we’ve been blind. He has given us the chance, where we’ve been lost, to find our best selves.”
“Through the example of their lives, they’ve now passed it on to us. May we find ourselves worthy of that precious and extraordinary gift, as long as our lives endure. May grace now lead them home. May God continue to shed His grace on the United States of America.”
— Compiled by Robert Behre.
By: Schuyler Kropf and Tony Bartelme, The Post and Courier, Charleston, South Carolina,Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, June 26, 2015
June 28, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Clementa Pinckney, Confederate Flag, President Obama, Racial Injustice | Amazing Grace, Black Churches, Emanuel AME Church, Gun Violence, Jim Clyburn, Mass Shootings, Nikki Haley, South Carolina 9 |
2 Comments
Even as a lot of conservatives advanced dumb revisionist histories whereby no Republican had ever expressed sympathy for the Confederacy and its symbols, RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende offered a clear-eyed analysis of the politics of the matter in recent decades, and while I don’t agree with all his conclusions, it’s a breath of fresh air.
Long story short: Trende argues that the “flag” controversy became a big deal during a relatively brief period when the older downscale rural white southerners who care about it were up for grabs (at least in non-presidential contests) between the two parties, and is now coming to an end because Democrats have lost them and Republicans can now take them for granted.
Because Democrats no longer see any electoral payoff in talking to guys with Confederate flags in the back of their pickup trucks, they no longer have any incentive to make even weak gestures toward keeping the flag around. Progressives are freed from their need to keep up their awkward dance with rural Southerners for the sake of maintaining some degree of power in the South (a dance that dates back at least to FDR’s reluctance to endorse anti-lynching laws). Polarization has forced them – and freed them – to explore new paths to power.
At the same time, it’s important to realize that most prominent Southern Republican politicians have roots in either the suburban or old establishment Democrat wings of the party. I doubt if Nikki Haley or Bobby Jindal grew up with much affection for the Confederate flag. The same goes for Mitch McConnell – who entered politics in Jefferson County (Louisville), an old Union town whose Republicanism was strong enough that it almost voted for Herbert Hoover in 1932.
The examples Trende offers of this dynamic include one with which I am very familiar: Zell Miller coming out for a “flag” change in 1993 and then losing badly among white rural voters in 1994. Cause and effect are not easy to untangle here, however. Miller was already going to lose a lot of support in rural North Georgia in 1994 because in 1990 he benefited enormously from a “native son” effect–North Georgia had rarely produced governors in a state long dominated politically by South Georgia “black belt” pols–that would not appear a second time. He also had an alternative strategy for a majority, based on his education initiatives, and in fact, he won in 1994 because some of his rural losses were offset by suburban gains. All of this is consistent with Trende’s theory that “polarization” eventually took the “flag” off the table, but real politicians had real risks and decisions to make.
As for Trende’s idea that neither party has had any interest in defending the Confederate heritage once Battle-flag-loving rural whites died off or became part of the GOP “base,” I think he misses the broader resonance of neo-Confederate ideology, which isn’t just about battle flags and whistling Dixie. As I argued at TPMCafe earlier this week, all sorts of notions associated with the Confederacy, from absolute state sovereignty and absolute private property rights to a hostile/paternalistic attitude towards African-Americans, remain active elements of hard-core conservative ideology. That they may now fly under the different, red-white-and-blue flag of “constitutional conservatism”–complete with the tricorner hat of the Tea Party–doesn’t change that.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 25, 2015
June 26, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Christian Conservatives, Confederate Flag, Racism, White Supremacy | African Americans, Conservatives, Georgia, Neo-Confederacy, Politics, Republicans, Tea-party, White Southerners, Zell Miller |
1 Comment
Even before eBay followed Walmart, Sears and Amazon’s lead by banning “rebel-flagged” items from its giant virtual yard sale, I realized that what I was watching was not a typical consumer revolt.
The Confederate battle flag — that bellicose assertion of a Southern “heritage” otherwise known as “white supremacy,” that defiant, “fuck you” of a symbol in whose honor the blood of far more than nine people has been shed — it wasn’t suddenly toxic because of last week’s massacre in Charleston. Multinational corporations, and the politicians they keep on retainer, weren’t disowning the flag because of a popular movement. The people hadn’t had the time to organize. The pavement on this road to Damascus was still wet.
Instead, what was actually happening, behind the scenes, wasn’t nearly so romantic. No one was breaking from their usual habits. Everyone, in fact, was doing what they always did. The profit-seeking entities were trying to maximize future earnings; and the state-level politicians were following their demands. This wasn’t a case of the powers-that-be doing something they resented. No one was pushed here; everyone was ready to jump.
Not for the first time in 2015, the conservative movement has found itself on the losing side of a culture war battle it once routinely won. And just as was the case in Indiana, when a petty and combative anti-gay law inspired national boycotts and a business-sector backlash, movement conservatives cannot fathom how liberals aren’t to blame. It’s conservatives, after all, who man the ramparts to protect capitalism and big business. As he was ranting about “the left’s” war on the Confederate flag on Tuesday, one could almost hear Rush Limbaugh transform into Walter Sobchak from “The Big Lebowski,” bellowing, “Has the whole world gone crazy?!”
He wasn’t alone, of course. And despite what you might expect, his tribal loyalty to the “Stars and Bars” (a misnomer, by the way) wasn’t exclusive to conservatives of his age. A young woman at Breitbart was similarly incensed by the flag’s sudden toxicity, blaming a “howling mob of both liberals and brown-nosing conservatives” for Amazon’s betrayal of the Confederacy’s trademark. A Generation X editor at the Federalist railed against the media for asking businesses if they planned to stop selling the flag, calling it “heretic hunting” and activism disguised as reporting. An evidently impatient colleague of hers took it one step further, likening calls against romanticizing the Confederacy to the Nazi regime.
As these spasms of inchoate rage overtook movement conservatives, it was almost funny how desperate they were to find someone — anyone — besides capitalists to blame. Bill Kristol, the self-styled Hébert of neoconservatism, trolled his way to sophomoric analogies involving a Cliff Notes version of the French Revolution; and then tumbled into the 19th century, saying,“today’s liberals would surely have been Copperheads.” One of the lesser lights at Hot Air, Michelle Malkin’s former haunt, provided a nice example of the “whataboutism” that became widespread on the right, asking no one in particular how the Confederacy could be bad so long as angsty teenagers still thought Che Guevara was cool?
Beneath their caterwauling and free-floating resentment, though, conservatives evinced a level of disorientation and fear that was in some ways sympathetic. It was like watching a millenarian sect discover the new Jerusalem was actually a suburban cul-de-sac. If liberals could not be blamed for this new dishonor, if it wasn’t liberals’ fault that the cultural norms of 2015 and 1995 were no longer the same, then what was the answer? Lefties might note how, under capitalism, “[a]ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned,” and say that the signifiers of the Confederacy were no different. But that’s of little to use to those who’d describe President Obama as a Bolshevik.
Yet for all the right’s professed belief in “common sense,” the reason why businesses were, metaphorically, setting the flag to the flame continued to elude conservatives, even when it was staring them in the face. As CNN, the Associated Press and others reported, the Amazons, eBays, Sears and Walmarts of the world weren’t acting out of fear or sentiment. Their motivations were straightforward, cold, and rational. Walmart wants to shed its reputation as a Red State phenomenon; Sears wants to prove it’s not exclusively for dads; Amazon’s politics are, if anything, probably “liberaltarian”; and it’s hard to imagine eBay’s pro-Confederate market was ever that big.
All of these companies, and the others like them surely to follow, were simply looking at the future; and what they saw was an America where a business implicitly legitimizing the flag had more to lose than to gain. As Jonathan Chait rightly argued, an old understanding of what it means to be American — an understanding profoundly bound to a certain definition of whiteness and constructed on a foundation of racist, revisionist history — is fading. “I know we’re going to lose eventually,” one pro-Confederate South Carolinian told the New York Times. His ranks, and the influence of his kind on the American mainstream, shrink a little more every day.
By: Elias Isquith, Staff Writer, Salon, June 25, 2015
June 26, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Businesses, Confederate Flag, White Supremacy | Bill Kristol, Charleston South Carolina Shootings, Conservatives, Emanuel AME Church, media, Michelle Malkin, Racism, Rush Limbaugh |
2 Comments
Let’s not get carried away here, friends told me yesterday. A flag is just a symbol. When they stop passing voter-ID laws or start passing gun laws, then I’ll be impressed.
This is a sound view, no doubt about that. But if you don’t think symbols matter, think about how tenaciously people fight to hold on to them. And more than that: In terms of our political culture, the pending removal of the Confederate battle flag from South Carolina’s capitol grounds, and now Mississippi’s state flag—and, don’t forget, from WalMart’s shelves—represents a rare win for North over South since Reconstruction.
This is a history and set of facts that far too few Americans know, and it’s vitally important to understand it in order to grasp the full magnitude of this moment. The South, more than the North, has dominated and defined the limits of America’s political culture for most of the last 140-ish years. The North has the money, the North has Wall Street, and the North runs (most of) our high and popular culture. But the South has run our politics. And this moment that we’re witness to now could be the blessed beginning of the end of all that.
It all started during Reconstruction, when a debate ensued about how the Civil War would be remembered. Our guide through these waters is Yale historian David Blight, whose groundbreaking book Race and Reunion tells this story. He shows masterfully how collectively historical memory is constructed.
According to Blight, there were three competing interpretations of the war. The “emancipationist” one emphasized slavery as the cause of the war and the slaves’ freedom as its great moral accomplishment. The “reconciliationist” view emphasized the common hardships endured by soldiers and citizens who were after all countrymen. There was also a white supremacist version that marginalized the role of slavery as a cause of the conflict (sound familiar?), but the main interpretive battle was between the first two.
It’s a long a complex and quite revolting story about this country we love, and you should read the book. But the gist of it is that in the interest of national reconciliation, the North—where, let’s face it, there was also no shortage of racists in the late 1800s—capitulated to a view of the war with which the South could be comfortable, as a battle that fully and finally unified a country that never really had been.
Gettysburg became organized basically around Pickett’s Charge, the last thrust of the Lost Cause. By the time of Woodrow Wilson—the first Southern-born president since Andrew Johnson had taken over from the slain Lincoln, and a militant segregationist—there was a 50-year commemoration of that battle attended by 50,000 veterans, not one of them black.
Meanwhile, historical memory was morphing into political reality. In Congress, the United States entered the era of the Southern committee barons whose influence on the making of national policy was obscenely out of proportion to either their numbers or the extent to which their views, particularly on race, reflected broader American sentiment. Accruing seniority and working the rules, Southerners (and yes, conservatives, they were all Democrats then; so what?) gained power. By Franklin Roosevelt’s time, of the House’s 10 most important committees, Southerners chaired nine. As for the Senate, all you need to know is this sentence, penned by the journalist William S. White in 1957: “The Senate might be described without too much violence to fact as the South’s unending revenge upon the North for Gettysburg.”
The Southerners used that power to one end far above all others: keep black people down. But then, starting in 1958, the Senate began to elect some liberals; and outside the halls of power, which is where change actually happens, a certain young charismatic minister was changing white minds and opening white hearts across the country, even a few in the South.
Next came the only years, roughly 1964 to sometime in the mid-1970s, depending on how you measure it, that the North vanquished the South politically since the Civil War. Many chairmanships changed hands; the racists were defeated and changed political parties; accommodation of the South was no longer something most Northerners and Westerners were interested in.
So that was all good, but that of course doesn’t end our story. The South, through the person of Californian Ronald Reagan, who gave a high-profile speech invoking “states’ rights” in the very town where erstwhile states’ righters had murdered Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney in 1964, came roaring back. The Christian Coalition became a force. From 1980 until 2008, the Democrats did manage to win two presidential elections, but only because they put forward an all-Southern ticket that talked more about “family values” than most Democrats would have really preferred, even if they did understand the political reality.
Just as Blight observed a post-Civil War era that saw two world views, one fundamentally progressive and the other fundamentally reactionary, competing to interpret the past and thereby define the future, I argue that we’ve been living through something very similar since 1980. And just like the emancipationists and reconciliationists, we’re stuck in the ’60s: They were quarreling about the 1860s, we about the 1960s. And in our political culture for most of the past 35 years, the modern-day version of the reconciliationists has won.
But now that’s changing. Fortunately, the emancipationists control the culture from New York and Hollywood, and they’ve pushed back on the Southerners hard—this too is a huge change from the old days, when for example television networks were extremely careful not to offend Southern tastes. And so even the Southern Baptist Convention has quieted down about same-sex marriage, even if the Republican candidates haven’t.
But this—this flag business is the first instance I can recall of conservative Republican Southern politicians defying their right-wing base on an issue of first-order emotional importance. It’s important that this isn’t some liberal federal judge ordering the flag removed. It’s Republican politicians doing it. I’m not saying that to pat them on the back—they’re at least a decade late to be getting anything resembling credit as far as I’m concerned. I’m just observing it as telling: When future David Blights write about how the South started losing its hold on America’s political culture in 2015, they’ll write about this moment, the first time their leaders said to them, “Your position is just too morally undignified for me to defend anymore.”
For his part, the actual living David Blight isn’t as hopeful about this as I am. In response to my question, he emailed me yesterday: “This may indeed be a rare moment. But if my work shows anything it might be simply to say beware when right-wing manipulators of historical memory offer reconciliation. They are looking for cover for other and perhaps larger matters.”
He’s correct, of course. This massacre is still about guns and terrorism, and it’s about South Carolina’s voter-ID laws too, on which Clementa Pinckney was one of just two favorable votes in the state Senate. All those fights will continue, with the usual achingly slow progress (if progress at all on guns).
But this is still a big deal. It could usher in a second era of conquest over Southern political hegemony. If that happens, those other fights will be easier to win, eventually, too.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 24, 2015
June 25, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Confederate Flag, Deep South, South Carolina | Civil War, Congress, Gun Control, Racism, Reconstruction, Slavery, Terrorism, Voter ID Laws, White Supremacists |
2 Comments
Out of the swirl of chaos, grief, grace, and courage that has followed the Charleston shooting, partisan politics has mostly kept its rightful place nowhere near the state of South Carolina.
But the national debate over the future of the Confederate flag that flies in front of the state’s capitol has unwittingly given rise to one of the more bizarre Clinton conspiracy theories to date: that Bill and Hillary Clinton, despite decades as civil rights advocates and their right-wing caricature as Northeast liberal elites, are closet Confederate sympathizers.
The meme took off on Sunday, when The Daily Caller ran a story under the headline “Flashback: Bill Clinton Honored the Confederacy on Arkansas State Flag.”
The next morning, the hosts of Fox & Friends debated whether Hillary Clinton had refused to denounce the Confederate flag flying in front of the South Carolina (though she actually did denounce it in 2007) out of loyalty to her husband, who, Elisabeth Hasselbeck said, “signed a law honoring the Confederacy in Arkansas and about the flag’s design in 1987…that stated, ‘the blue star is to commemorate the Confederate states of America.”
The legislation that The Daily Caller, Fox & Friends, and now dozens of conservative blogs are referencing was a bill to make the flag that Arkansas had flown since 1924 the state’s official flag. That flag includes four stars, three to symbolize the countries that held the Arkansas territory—Spain, France and the United States—and the fourth, as Hasselbeck said, “to commemorate the Confederate states of America.”
Nowhere in the state’s legislative history does it explain why the 63-year-old flag needed to be made official, but Arkansas historians have two explanations. First, the legislature was moving to give the state a number of “official” designations—think “official state butterfly,” “official state grain”—as it celebrated its sesquicentennial.
Second, Bill Clinton and the state legislature were pushing through a series of measures to ban flag desecration as the U.S. Supreme Court debated and eventually struck down the 48 state laws against flag burning, including Arkansas’s ban. Historians told me they believed the 1987 flag bill was passed to specify the official design of the state flag in conjunction with that effort. As governor, Clinton later signed a bill making it a crime to burn or deface a flag, a move that drew vocal complaints from the American Civil Liberties Union.
It is true that Clinton did nothing in his time as governor to remove the state flag’s reference to Arkansas’s role in the Confederacy. But by all accounts, the bill he signed making the state’s flag official was not created as a Confederate memorial. The sponsor of the bill, longtime Arkansas legislator W.D. “Bill” Moore, has since died, but former Representative Steve Smith said, “I served with Bill Moore in the early 1970s, and he was hardly a neo-Confederate. Nor was Bill Clinton.”
The more recent Clintonian history related to the Confederate flag is easier to find and may be one of the more straightforward positions either Clinton has ever taken. Both have been consistently, unambiguously against its use.
During Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, he endorsed Georgia Governor Zell Miller’s fruitless attempt to remove the St. Andrews Cross from the Georgia state flag, a change that eventually came nine years later, and made Miller the keynote speaker at Clinton’s 1992 Democratic National Committee nominating convention.
In 2000, as South Carolina wrestled with the future of the Confederate flag that still flew above its capitol, then-President Clinton gave the state his unsolicited advice during a visit to Allen University, a historically black college in Columbia, just miles from the state capitol: Take the flag down. “As long as the waving symbol of one American’s pride is the shameful symbol of another American’s pain, we have bridges to cross in this country and we better get across them,”’ he told the students.
When Hillary Clinton became a candidate for president herself in 2007, she said much the same thing during her own visit to the state, telling the AP she thought South Carolina should remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds entirely, not just from the front of the capitol.
And Tuesday, after South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley’s call to finally remove the Confederate flag from the capitol grounds in the wake of the Charleston tragedy, Hillary Clinton called it the right thing to do.
“I appreciate the actions begun yesterday by the governor and other leaders of South Carolina to remove the Confederate battle flag from the State House, recognizing it as a symbol of our nation’s racist past that has no place in our present or our future,” Clinton said. “It shouldn’t fly there, it shouldn’t fly anywhere.”
There are more than enough reasons for members of the conservative media to be dubious about the Clintons: the deleted emails, the paid speeches, the Friends of Bill you thought went away with the Y2K bug but were actually just sitting on the Clinton Foundation payroll waiting for the next Clinton administration to begin.
But accusing either Clinton of being a Confederate sympathizer, past or present, is a conspiracy beneath even its creators.
By: Patricia Murphy, The Daily Beast, June 24, 2015
June 25, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Bill and Hillary Clinton, Confederate Flag, Conservative Media, Conspiracy Theories | Arkansas, Bill Moore, Elisabeth Hasselbeck, Fox News, Nikki Haley, Right Wing Media, Zell Miller |
Leave a comment
mykeystrokes.com 