Your thoughts on "Whites Only" prom in GA?

There was a black graduation reception at our school (won't say which one, so don't ask ).

This didn't exclude other races, but was advertised accordingly. I have wondered about this.

Also, there was a petition to have the ceremony seperated - by the black students. I am puzzled!

 

Dennis --

A thoughtful post; I meant to respond to the rest of it on my first take:

The trouble is that the Confederate battle flag hasn't traditionally been a part of mainstream Southern heritage; it wasn't even designed until 1861, and the flag the Confederacy actually flew at government sites looked completely different. Segregationists co-opted the Confederate battle flag and added it to their state flags in the thirties, forties, and fifties as a "don't tread on me" gesture against integration. It didn't work, but what they did manage to do was get the flaky idea in our heads that the Confederate battle flag was an essential symbol of Southern culture. It was little more than a quaint military symbol until the segregationist backlash.

Technically, it was 249 years (the first slaves arrived in 1619, and slavery wasn't completely abolished until 1868). Many of the Founding Fathers were abolitionists; Ben Franklin actually co-founded a major anti-slavery organization in Philadelphia, and dedicated the last few years of his life to it. Jefferson owned slaves, but opposed slavery in principle and fought to abolish it. George Washington was of a similar mindset, and (if memory serves) freed his slaves in his will. There was a very heated argument about whether the original U.S. Constitution ought to abolish slavery, but by the 1780s slavery had become such an entrenched part of the Southern agricultural economy that an abolition clause, coupled with Anti-Federalist objections, would have sunk the Constitution altogether. But the idea certainly was that slavery would be phased out by attrition, which is why the international slave trade was abolished in 1808 and mechanisms were introduced to allow slaves to become free persons over time. Unfortunately, Southerners got past this by setting up an interstate slave trade and breeding their slaves like livestock to keep the supply chain going. They also occasionally kidnapped free African-Americans and declared them fugitive slaves, a proposition most Southern governments did not argue with. It was generally a nasty situation.

It's true that some Northern states also had slavery (Maryland was, I believe, the last state to officially abolish it), but over 90% of slaves lived in the South. You should also bear in mind that house slaves were treated far better than field slaves, and nearly all of the Northern slaves were house slaves, while the vast majority of Southern slaves were field slaves. (That's because the North had an industrial economy, while the South relied on agriculture.) One could also live comfortably as a free black in the North; not so in most Southern states.

This was the major and explicit reason for South Carolina's secession; Lincoln was elected on a platform of preventing slavery from expanding into the Western Territories, and Southern states feared that he would move on to an emancipation program. Since the Southern agricultural economy thrived on unpaid labor (and paying the laborers would have crippled the profits), the plantation owners weren't crazy about this idea.

This is true. Robert E. Lee himself described slavery as a "moral and political evil."

This is also true.

258,000, if you count deaths by disease. And this was out of an army of about one million, versus the Union's army of about two million (which lost 360,000 troops).

The greatest coup the Southern segregationists ever had was that they successfully tied in the essence of Southern culture with the Confederate battle flag. Well, I guess they were bound to get one victory out of all that, but I'm glad Georgia scrapped the damned thing. Mississippi is the only remaining state that hasn't, though I'm hopeful that it will eventually.


Cheers,

 

Southern Trivia

Somehow relevant to this thread. I was in New Orleans last week and I took my family to Monticello today. The following info has been added to my treasured collection of useless trivia:

1. "One distinction accorded to Sally Hemings and to no other enslaved Monticello family was the freedom granted all of her children after the age of twenty-one."

http://www.monticello.org/plantation/hemingscontro/appendixh.html

Jefferson could not have freed any more slaves even if he wanted to, due to severe indebtedness.

http://www.monticello.org/jefferson/dayinlife/plantation/dig.html

2. The name "Dixie" is said to have come from the French word for ten, dix. Dix was printed on the ten dollar bills issued by the bank in New Orleans.