While most of the nation watched last night as voters in Indiana dealt a death blow to one presidential candidate’s campaign while keeping alive the fantasies of another, a few people focused on a city council election held in Danville, Virginia, best known as the last capital of the Confederacy. Running for reelection were three council members who had supported the removal of a Confederate outside the Sutherlin Mansion, otherwise known as the last Confederate White House, where Jefferson Davis learned of the surrender of Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant.
The Virginia Flaggers were out in force on this one:
Well, the results are in, and the Flaggers are not happy. So much for #novotesforturncoats. Exactly why these three people are “turncoats” is another matter altogether, but never let reality get in the way of a snappy turn of praise … like “Restore the honor.”
Apparently the Flaggers believe that internet memes and hashtags are enough to secure a big win. I’m waiting for the assertion that the candidates are outsiders who aren’t welcome in Susan Hathaway’s Virginia.
Of course, Karen Cooper comes from New York, so she’s an outsider, too, right? And what about Billy Bearden?
I guess some outsiders are okay.
Maybe it’s time for the Flaggers to set aside their flag-raising campaign and build a really big wall around the Old Dominion.
No word yet on whether the Flaggers will resort to urging violence against the victorious candidates, for we now know that they have no problem with snipers picking off opponents. Then again, one recalls how one Confederate heritage advocate thought it would be a good idea to slaughter schoolchildren to make a point.
No wonder Virginia Flagger leader Susan Hathaway celebrates white supremacist terrorist heroes Nathan Bedford Forrest and Wade Hampton. It’s all part of “restoring the honor.”
Crossroads 
I am sure that Charlottesville will get another Virginia Flagger Failure Flag in the future. I would bet they have already scouted a perfect site for the flag like the usually scout for suitable bathrooms before their events…and even a delicious hot dog stand for one of their members.
HOT DOGS! Get yer HOT DOGS!!!
I would love to know how being preposterous is ever honorable.
I think this is just a forerunner to what is coming in November for the heritage types and their close friends. The heritage folks are seeing their worst nightmare come to life right in front of them. Their version of history has been examined and found wanting. Their ideology has been examined and is being rejected. They themselves are being marginalized by Americans of all walks of life.
They should just get together and name their senior citizens home before it’s too late.
“Our Lady of Perpetual Amnesia Retirement Home”
“Haters for Heritage House”
“Racist Retirement Center”
“Nathan Bedford Forrest Center for Senile Seniors”
“The Robert E. Lee House for Failed Flaggers”
Well, the flaggers and neo-Confederates of all stripes better get use to the New South as the old South is soon to be “gone with the wind.” The vast majority of southerners are not mourning her death. It’s perfectly fine to remember ones history and to pay due respect to your ancestors, but it’s long past time to recognize the Confederate Era for what it was: an attempt to perpetuate a society based on white supremacy. It was an ugly time in our national history, and true southerners are working hard to erase the legacy left by the Confederacy and Reconstruction, not wallow in it. I guess, in my mind, the proper perspective for a southern with Confederate ancestors would be akin to that of a German family who had a relative who fought in the German Army in WWII. They might honor their kin by placing flowers on his grave. They might believe he was an honorable person doing his duty to his country at the time. But, they don’t believe his cause was just. They don’t go around looking for places to fly the Nazi flag to “restore the honor.” (Actually that’s illegal in Germany.) They realize that the cause for which their relative fought was totally dishonorable and the Nazi Era is not something to be remembered with any sense of pride at all.
One more thought crosses my mind as I talk about the comparison of the Nazi Era in Germany and the Confederate Era in the United States of America. This one is very personal. My father had a friend he met in the late 1930s at the University of Chicago. His name was Peter Olden. He was a German national. When the war broke out Dr. Olden joined the U.S. Army to fight to free his homeland of the Nazi scourge. In my mind he was a real hero. Likewise, the southern’s who donned the blue and fought for the Union were, in my mind, the real southern heroes.
If interested, here’s a brief tribute that I wrote about Peter Olden a few months ago: http://tinyurl.com/h3mtu4k
In all my travels to the South, the thing that struck me the most was the abundance of American flags and the lack of Confederate flags. It’s quite noticeable.
I agree. I’ve even noticed this when retracing the March to the Sea route of my ancestors. And, most of the private homes flying the state flag on that route have the newer one that’s sans Confederate symbolism.
Over the last couple of years I’ve made several long driving trips across Texas and back — over a thousand miles, round trip — and most times I can count the number of Confederate flags I see on one hand. (Although on my last trip I did come across a ranch gate on Highway 36 near Hamilton with about eight of them.) These are rural areas, very conservative, and very big on displaying their patriotism. Every other home or business, it seems, displays a U.S. flag, a Texas flag, or (often) both — but Confederate flags are very rare. Even the SCV-sponsored flagpole on the highway interchange outside of Sweetwater, where Highway 84 splits from I-20, last time I drove by there was flying a Bonnie Blue flag, rather than a CBF or one of the national Confederate flags.
I agree, in my travels over to Virginia and Tennessee I have seen the flag restricted to battlefields and cemeteries. Nothing much in residential areas at all which questions really what type of significance the flaggers have in the general public. With that being said, I question why it is necessary to have endless blog entries about a group that does not represent at all the general feelings of the public nor beliefs based on historical truths. I don’t follow this blog but was a bit surprised at the level of attention that these groups get here. Love to see more important news on current perservation efforts related to Civil War. A lot of great work is being done in that area.
You don’t follow this blog but you know about what is in it. Right. You are free to start your own blog on “perservation efforts.” Let’s see you take your own advice, “Steve” … er, “Rick25.” Pathetic and skeered.
Seeing the photos of above of the three city councilmen, it was interesting to note that two are African American and one European American. That such diversity exists in a small town in rural Virginia on the North Carolina border, is great testimony to rise of the New South.
But, yesterday, I became aware of new evidence that an icon of Old South bigotry has been misrepresented by history. Believe it or not, Ty Cobb, was not a racist. In fact, he was decidedly the opposite. This is a good lesson in how history can be distorted and how it takes diligent, primary source research sometimes to find out that a commonly held belief is wrong. Here are two short paragraphs from a recent New York Times review of Charles Leerhsen’s new book, Ty Cobb: A Terrible Beauty:
“Leerhsen’s correctives are convincing, particularly his evidence against two of the more serious and persistent criticisms of Cobb: that he purposely endangered opponents by filing his shoe’s spikes to an extra-fine point before flying around the bases; and that he was notably racist, even for his time, with his many physical altercations often fueled by that animus.
“Cobb’s grandfather and great-grandfather were staunchly antislavery, Leerhsen notes, and his father could sometimes speak ‘a bit like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird.’ Cobb himself praised black players, including Roy Campanella and Willie Mays, and spoke out in favor of the sport’s integration. “The Negro should be accepted and not grudgingly but wholeheartedly,” he said in 1952. Leerhsen’s book makes a persuasive argument that at the very least, Cobb’s irascibility was not motivated explicitly by race, and that certain fabled brawls chalked up to fervent bigotry may never have happened in the first place.” (Full review: http://tinyurl.com/hdg3ep5)
Even more to the point here, a story based on a college speech given by Mr. Leerhsen printed in Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, says the following:
“. . . Ty Cobb was the descendant of a long line of abolitionists. His great-grandfather was a minister who preached against slavery and was run out of town for it. His grandfather refused to fight in the Confederate army because of the slavery issue. And his father was an educator and state senator who spoke up for his black constituents and is known to have once broken up a lynch mob.”
The Imprimis article goes on to say that Cobb personally attended many Negro league ball games, sometimes was asked to throw out the first pitch, and often sat with the players in the dugout.
So, with this new information about The Georgia Peach, we find another enlightened southerner, who the Virginia Flaggers and other neo-Confederates would do well to emulate. I ain’t holding my breath.
If nothing else, they might start lobbying for Pete Rose to get into the Hall. 🙂
You mean another hopeless cause? If so, I see your point. I’m afraid, though, that Pete Rose is more like Shoeless Joe Jackson than he is like Ty Cobb, except maybe in the degree to which he was always hustling (on the base paths). What he did off the field threatened the very integrity of the game. You don’t bet on baseball when you are playing the game. And, one of the real ironies is that the Black Sox Scandal occurred against the Cincinnati Reds. Many of my friends who are Cincinnati Reds fans just can’t seem to come to grips with the fact the Pete is never going to get into the HOF. They make all kinds excuses. One of their favorites has been saying that you’ve got to let Pete in if you allow scondrels like Ty Cobb in. After this new revelation about what Ty Cobb was really like and that he wasn’t actually a scondrel, they are going to have to find another example to whine about. The more I think about it an alliance with the Virginia Flaggers might be a good way to bind two groups of losers together. Go Cubs! 😉
I hope that the public officials in Virginia learn a lesson from the Danville election, and that is don’t mess with the Flaggers when they flex their political muscle. Am I being too sarcastic?
In 2012 the Flaggers went all-in to “Boot Elrod,” the mayor of Lexington who they blamed for the 2011 city ordinance that banned non-official flags from city fixtures. Elrod’s opponent was one member of the city council who had voted to keep the flags, so the election could be viewed as a public referendum on the subject. But that ordinance doesn’t seem to have been put forward as an issue by either campaign in the election, and Mimi Elrod was re-elected with a larger share of the vote than she had been the first time.
It would be nice if the Virginia Flaggers had the maturity to let communities like Lexington, Danville, Charlottesville, and now Louisville, Kentucky (!) make their own decisions, without trying actively to interfere with what ought to be a local issue, but don’t expect that to happen anytime soon.
At least at this point the flaggers have respected the electoral process. I personally don’t see how they can bring an erroneous lawsuit against such an electoral referendum as this, but their campaign to “restore the honor” hasn’t exactly made logical or legal sense to this point either. Whatever happens I’m sure it will be interesting to see the ideological and illogical twists they’ll go through to defend their “Lost Cause”.
I’m not sure why one might think that. Time and time again — in Lexington, in Danville, in Charlottesville — they have mocked, insulted, name-called and posited various reasons why elected officials in those communities are illegitimate and unqualified to decide on matters of Confederate “heritage.” Its not only an insult to those officials, but to the communities they represent.
The Virginia Flaggers’ tactics have nothing to do with changing skeptical or opposed views toward their own; it’s all about showing off for their butternut friends how unreconstructed they are.
“Maybe it’s time for the Flaggers to set aside their flag-raising campaign and build a really big wall around the Old Dominion.”
Brooks, please, no! The rest of us in the Old Dom don’t want to be walled in with these kooks. How ’bout just a wall around their fearless leader’s Sandston compound to which they can all self-deport?
“The Sandston compound.” I like that. Grayson Jennings has the machinery to build it. I’ll throw in the tin foil for the hats.
I truly hope that you and your family become victims of the Knock Out Game, while you’re absent mindedly strolling along the boulevard one evening. You deserve to have Sharia Law imposed upon you, and to be Affirmative Actioned out of your jobs, or Replaced by the UnDocumented who are willing to work harder for less money than Neo-Americans, like YOU. The great thing is, the symbiotic relationship that has been created to destroy western civilization will disintegrate the moment that the common goal has been achieved. Then, all of the “special interest” groups will turn on eachother like the pack of thieves and degenerates that they are; each blaming the other for their own difficulties and shortcomings. The Blacks and the Hispanics are already battling it out in turf wars in Oakland, Los Angeles, Houston and other cities across the country. The first to be eliminated by the hordes of Foreigners and Black Lives Matter “demonstrators,” will be the limp-wristed, whiny, liberal White people, who are too enlightened to know how to defend themselves. Why do you think that White people are the preferred victims of violent crime? Because, the Negroes and Latinos know that White Liberals are weak and cowardly, and make easy targets. I only hope that when the chaos erupts, that the racially conscious White folks will remember who you are, and what you stood for when it mattered, and refuse to grant you sanctuary within their fold. There is nothing more poetic than a “Social Justice Warrior” being beaten to death by the ethnic minorities that they championed. It happens more often than you think.
That you for explaining to us what is behind Confederate heritage … at least in your mind.
Did anyone ever tell you that you sound a lot like Connie Chastain?
Wow. Well done. You completed the checklist. Here’s your Trump bumper sticker.
“Neo-Americans”!?