On a recent journey through eastern North Carolina, I spied this rather large Confederate flag planted in front of a tomb in a cemetery beside a country church. The stars and bars were gently flowing in the summer breeze, creating the only movement under the large oaks covering the burial places and recreating a momentary motion that we once thought was gone with the wind.
I wondered out loud: When did Dixie die? Else what is she doing in this graveyard among the dead? Did someone finally do her wrong and do her in? There’s a song somewhere about the day that Dixie died, and this must have been where it happened.
Of course, having grown up in Dixie, I know how most of the myth goes. We are all supposed to save our Confederate money, boys, ’cause the South will rise again! Old times there are not forgotten. I remember when they played “Dixie” before certain events in the Magnolia state, you would stand and place your right hand over your heart. We only observed Confederate Memorial Day in my hometown and not the other one. And anybody north of Memphis was either a communist, a Yankee or an outside agitator. “Forget, Hell! ” was the favorite bumper sticker for Chevy pickups with shotguns in their rear windows. Some southern folk were a little more tolerant. They allowed how if those people who started the war of northern aggression would only give us back the silver, we’d forget the whole thing.
Several years ago Mitch Landrieu, the Mayor of New Orleans, delivered a speech on the removal Confederate monuments in the Big Easy. Listen to a few of his poignant words: This is, however, about showing the whole world that we as a city, that we as a people are able to acknowledge, to understand, to reconcile, and more importantly, choose a better future for ourselves, making straight what has been crooked and making right what was wrong. Otherwise, we will continue to pay a price with discord, with division, and yeah, violence.
History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done. The Civil War is over. The Confederacy lost — and we’re better for it. Surely we are far enough removed from this dark time to acknowledge that the cause of the Confederacy was wrong. And in the second decade of the 21st century, asking African Americans — or anyone else for that matter — to drive by property that they own; occupied by reverential of men who fought to destroy the country and deny that person’s humanity seems perverse. It seems absurd. Century-old wounds are still raw because, you see, they never healed right in the first place. So here is the essential truth: We are better together than we are apart. Indivisibility is our essence.
Lest we forget, the blood of Gettysburg and Vicksburg was spilled on those fields by Rebels and Yanks who had a cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion. And the new nation has risen out of the graves of slaves and slave owners. And there’s really no point to whistling Dixie as the antithesis of today’s reality. We are overcoming much of the tragedy – the bitterness and bigotry and racism of our past and someday, by the grace of Almighty God, we shall all overcome.