Feature Diaspora
and carrying a large Rebel battle flag. He did this, he says, to protest against the banning of Confederate symbols by a school district in Texas. While some African-Americans admit to being amused by Edgerton, the Ku Klux Klan is not. It is claimed the Klan fired shots at the home of one of Edgerton’s relatives to warn him to stop parading around in Confederate uniforms. Edgerton escaped injury, but he does not accept that a white South- erner would try to hurt him. “Any time anything bad happens around here in the Southland,” Edgerton complains, “these folks always point to this flag and point to Southern folk and say ‘Oh those bad old Southern folk. Look what they do to the poor black people round here’.” Like Winbush and the other black Civil
War revisionists, Edgerton says the so- called “war between the States” did not oc- cur because of slavery. It occurred because of Northern meddling in Southern affairs, Edgerton insists. Te South, he adds, was right to secede and had it been allowed to manage its own affairs, it would have eventually ended slavery. Tere would have been no need for half a million Americans to die in a civil war or for the destruction of Southern economies, many of which have not yet recovered, Edgerton says. He adds that Hollywood has told the
story of black Union soldiers, but refuses to tell the story of blacks who served the Confederacy like Holt Collier, Mack Lee, and Weary Clyburn. Te city of Monroe, in North Carolina, was recently named 18 July “Weary Clyburn Day” in honour of this African-American’s supposed Confederate war service. “Hollywood won’t tell those stories,” claims Edger- ton. “Hollywood won’t talk about Black Confederates” like him. If Edgerton is a Black Confederate, then Robert Hayes is a white Confederate. Hayes is the director of the South Carolina branch of the League of the South, an organisation for whites who would like to see the South secede again, as it did 150 years ago, led by South Carolina. Hayes is a disaffected Southerner who
represents other disgruntled white South- erners. He does not see himself as a US citizen. He is, he says, a citizen of South Carolina, which he calls “my country”. It was one of the richest during slavery, but has been one of the poorest since. Talk of secession and slavery is never
78 | April 2011 New African “For the black Civil
War revisionists, the war did not occur because of slavery. It was the result of Northern meddling in Southern affairs.”
far from his lips. “Te South should not be ashamed of slavery,” Hayes insists and he is not ashamed that one of his great-grand- fathers owned slaves. Nor is he ashamed that South Carolina was infamous for its ill-treatment of enslaved Africans. One particularly notorious South Carolina slave owner was known for punishing his slaves by placing them in barrels in which sharp nails had been hammered, then roll- ing them down hills, the nails puncturing their bodies over and over again. “I think slavery should have ended later,
been more gradual,” Hayes says matter of factly. He adds that had slavery ended in, say, 1900 instead of 1865, white men would not have had to slaughter one another, and his beloved South would not be in the poor economic condition it is in now. As to whether African-Americans would have agreed to remain in bondage for another 30 or 40 years, Hayes says it would have been in their best interest to do so. It would have “given the slave who had limited talents and skills a chance to get used to being
The North’s Union Army defeated the South’s
Confederate Army with the aid of freed slaves who joined up
free”, Hayes adds. Besides, he says, the de- velopment of the tractor in the 1850s meant the South would not have had much more use, anyway, for the labour of enslaved Africans. “It just wouldn’t have made good sense to have slaves with the tractor.” Hayes is a descendant of the defeat-
ed and the shamed. As a director of the League of the South, he is a leader of a ragged army of angry whites who hanker after the past, longing for the good old days of the mythical “Old South”. Hayes and his constituents like to think
of themselves as having once been the masters, though their ancestors were more likely “poor whites”. In this time of the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War, they find themselves on the wrong side of history – in a country where a black man, to their horror, is president. Tese whites insist their South – which
is today the poorer, less educated half of America – will rise again some day. But this is not likely. Tey therefore find sol- ace in talk of secession and in dressing up whenever they can in Confederate costumes. And to thumb their noses at the upcoming Civil War celebrations, and remind themselves of the Old South and the way things used to be, Hayes and his constituents held a “Grand Secession Ball” in South Carolina, near where seces- sionists declared independence from the United States and pledged themselves to the South’s “peculiar institution”, slavery, 150 years ago. At the Grand Secession Ball, women dressed in hoop skirts and men in frock coats and in Confederate-style uni- forms, dancing to songs like “God Save the South” and “Conquer or Die”. Te next four years, when the US will
be inundated by Civil War events, will be long and hard for both Black and White Confederates alike. But Robert Hayes doesn’t agree. A part-time actor, he is con- vinced he will get a lot of work and make a lot of money playing his hero Jefferson Davis, leader of the Confederacy, in one Civil War production or another. “I’m hopeful,” he says, “[that] my calendar will be filled these four years.”
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