PROJECT
I’ve been doing research for a draft of a second podcast about St. Vincent’s Ceremony, discussing Dowling’s death and the fact that his grave remained unmarked for so many years. I’ve also been revising the first draft of the podcast about the statue. After finishing the drafts, I’ll meet with the group and we can talk about recording the podcast and how we want to go about doing that.
READINGS
When answering Horowitz’s question, I’m reminded of Frederick Douglass in the speech we read in class Tuesday or what King said near the end of Horowitz’s essay: remember your ancestors, but also remember what they fought for and recognize it is wrong. It is possible for Southerners to honor their Confederate forbearers without insulting black Southerners, but only if they acknowledge the complexity of the issue and that, in the end, slavery was wrong. What makes monuments to the Confederacy or celebrations of Confederate heroes insulting to blacks is that they give the appearance that these Southerners wanted for slavery to continue. As another man cited in the Horowitz essay said, if you have to celebrate in secret, which many Confederates celebrating have to do today, then there’s probably something wrong with your cause. White men and women come to celebrations of Martin Luther King, but black men and women would never feel comfortable attending a tribute to the Confederacy.
While blacks will likely never feel comfortable attending these Confederate memorials, it is possible for white Southerners to honor their ancestors without insulting black Southerners. Instead of celebrating the cause for which they fought, or vilifying the North, white Southerners need to find positive aspects of their ancestor’s heritage and celebrate those. Horwitz posits that some white Southerners still celebrate the Confederacy because in some cases it’s all they have got going for them, as it was with the man who remarried and has worked in a factory all of his life. Tracing one’s ancestors and celebrating them provides a distraction from the monotony of their modern life. The glory days of the Confederacy and the antebellum south, as well as heroic war stories (such as, say, Dick Dowling’s!) give them something to be proud of when there is little else going on in their lives. It is precisely this romanticization of the antebellum south and the Confederacy that makes tributes to the Confederate cause problematic. There is nothing wrong with celebrating one’s ancestors or their heroic deeds, but blacks understandably find it insulting when white Southerners romanticize a time when blacks were oppressed.
It would be completely unreasonable to suggest that every white Southerner with a Confederate ancestor demonize that ancestor and become ashamed of their past; there are far too many Southerners with Confederate ancestors for this to even be realistic. Southerners can still take pride in their heritage and ancestry, but they need to separate celebrating a war hero from romanticizing a period when millions of men, women and children were enslaved. If Southerners can find a way to commemorate their ancestors while acknowledging that the cause for which they fought was wrong and outdated, then these might become celebrations that could take place beyond closed doors.