Last week, The Hill reported that a Virginia school district had been sued by the state NAACP after it restored Confederate military names for two buildings. The school board in Shenandoah County had voted to change Mountain View High School to Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary back to Ashby Lee Elementary (after Robert E. Lee and Turner Ashby, a Confederate commander killed in battle).
With that greater subject in mind, independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. appeared last month on the “TimCast IRL” podcast, where host Tim Pool, asked Kennedy about activists tearing down Civil War statues. While clearly not a subject on the top of his list to discuss, the candidate deserves credit for addressing the controversy rather than ducking it, as most have of late.
When Pool specifically asked Kennedy about the tearing down of the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, which was subsequently melted down, the candidate gave a pained but thoughtful answer.
Kennedy reminded the host that he grew up in Virginia, and that a number of Confederate leaders had never owned slaves. He then stressed, in part: “I just have a visceral reaction against destroying history. I don’t like it…If we want to find people who are completely virtuous on every issue throughout history, we would erase all of history.”
As a “Yankee” born in the Dorchester neighborhood in the heart of Boston, Kennedy’s words resonated with me for several reasons. The is that, as a child, I grew up in abject poverty. By the time I was 17, we had been evicted from 34 homes. We often ended up homeless and living in a car. Sometimes, we ended up in majority Black housing projects.
It was one of the greatest blessings of my life, for I got to witness firsthand that Black America was a great America. The single Black moms I watched working two or more jobs to provide for their children not only became my role models, but my enduring heroes.
Around that same time, I became fascinated with the Civil War. At eight years old, I bought three books on the subject at a school library sale for 50 cents. I read every word and, even at that young age, my heart broke for the Americans killed and wounded in that war.
As a Yankee, it was expected of me to hate the South. But I did not. At that young age, I did not see blue uniforms, grey uniforms, the stars and stripes or the stars and bars. I only saw the faces of young men forced into a horrific war they did not want and mostly never understood — a war that claimed upwards of 800,000 men, which represented about 2.5 percent of the population at the time.
Over 300,000 who fought for the Confederate States of America lost their lives. Most were dirt poor and not fighting to preserve slavery; rather, they were fighting either because they were conscripted into war or because they were simply trying to protect their homes, their families and their towns. Many of those young men rightfully found slavery reprehensible, yet they fought and died under a flag which represents a pivotal and tragic part of our history.
To be sure, it is also a flag that has been used by vile racists over the years to taunt, provoke and inflame. As also reported on this site recently, country star Darius Rucker said in an interview that country music still carries a “stigma” of racism today. He said this in the context of being asked about a 2021 column he had written saying that country music still has a “stigma of rebel flags and racism.”
Rucker has a valid point. That said, how do we separate history from obscene histrionics?
Two years ago, I authored a book titled, “The 56 — Liberty Lessons from Those Who Risked All to Sign the Declaration of Independence.” I wrote the book because one year earlier, I heard voices from the left calling for the cancellation of the Independence Day, our Founding Fathers and the American flag.
Today, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, George Washington and other founders are regularly called “white supremacists”; their names are sandblasted off buildings; their statues are vandalized or torn down.
I argued in the book that it is very troubling that some would view men from 300 years ago through the often-clouded and biased prisms of the current day. What was truly in their hearts, minds and souls at the time?
If our history was bad, let us condemn it and learn from it. If it was good, let us praise it and build upon it. But let us never cancel our shared American history.
And yet, here we are. Some are determined to smear, label and cancel historical figures, documents and truths. Hopefully, there is a better solution.
As we remember that various totalitarians have cancelled history and toppled statues over the centuries, why don’t we call for civil and public debates regarding the history and symbols of the American Revolution and the Civil War? Record the debates and put them on social media for all to view. But all sides should agree upfront that history should never be cancelled or rewritten.
Douglas MacKinnon, a political and communications consultant, was a writer in the White House for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, and former special assistant for policy and communications at the Pentagon during the last three years of the Bush administration.