With a lot of attention being paid to Tennessee’s state legislature this month, it is interesting to look at an official proclamation issued by the Speaker of the State Senate Randy McNally honoring the Confederacy for “Confederate History Month” which is commemorated in April. The proclamation was issued in February.
Confederate History Month began to be celebrated in some Southern States in 1994 largely in reaction to the rise in observance of Black History Month. Over the last quarter century Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, and Virginia have observed Confederate History Month, although some have discontinued the practice. The Tennessee proclamation, largely ignored when it was issued, has drawn fire this week both because of what it says, and what it leaves out.
In the last decade, as Confederate History Month has attracted vocal opposition from the descendents of enslaved people, state proclamations have tended to include a denunciation of slavery coupled with neutrality on the cause of the Confederacy itself. This proclamation thoroughly identifies with the Confederate cause, as it has been rewritten by Lost Cause apologists, and leaves out any mention of slavery at all. Instead, its first section says that the Confederates engaged in a “four-year heroic struggle for states’ rights, individual freedom, local government control, and a determined struggle for deeply held beliefs…” This is a deliberate distortion of what the Confederacy was founded to protect, the preservation of slavery.
The fourth section is even more distorting. It honors the “noble spirit and inspiring leadership of the officers, soldiers, and citizens, free and not free, of the Confederate States…” This claim that enslaved Blacks showed “noble spirit” by serving as “officers, soldiers, and citizens” of the Confederacy is an ahistorical endorsement of the “Black Confederate Myth” cooked up by Lost Cause apologists less than fifty years ago to promote the notion that Blacks supported the Confederacy. In fact, Blacks were not “citizens” in any Confederate state, they were prohibited from enlistment in the Confederate Army until the last weeks of the Civil War, and they never served as officers. EVER!
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