Marshall Rawson was elected to the Florida legislature’s House of Representatives on Tuesday in District 10 which covers the area west of Jacksonville with Lake City as its largest city. Rawson is associated with the League of the South, a Neo-Confederate group with extreme views. The newly elected representative became involved with the League of the South when he was in college at Shorter University in Rome, Georgia. Rawson has posted on social media identifying himself with the League of the South. He has also been shown wearing a League of the South polo shirt as shown in the feature photograph above.
The League was founded by university professor Michael Hill. He claimed that the South was Celtic while the North was English and that this racial disparity caused the Civil War. However, he was wrong. By 1860 the South was overwhelmingly descended from English immigrants, not immigrants from Scotland or Ireland. Hill helped organize the United the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia where one counter-protester was killed and others were beaten. He was sued and the jury returned a $500,000 verdict against him.
Other founders of the group included Grady McWhiney and Forrest McDonald, two University of Alabama professors of history. They also claimed that the South was Celtic and said that the Celtic way of war involved fierce charges on those opposed to them. They said that this accounted for the Confederate armies heroic charges during the Civil War but that the heavy casualties doomed the Confederacy to losing the war. None of their demographic analysis is supported by sound research.
The League has resurrected calls for the Southern states to secede and Rawson had been engaged in propagandizing that. The League also says that the Southern citizenry is Celtic and Christian. It discourages immigration by non-white people. The only real Southerners are white.
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