Posted on 07/08/2002 6:30:00 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
BLOOMINGTON -- A brief discussion during the Gettysburg Diversity Project elicited a large public response via e-mail to The Pantagraph, which posted stories about the project on its Web site.
More than 50 e-mails were sent to the newspaper from several states, complaining that a trip that focused on diversity had ironically presented only one opinion about the Confederate flag.
Barb Adkins, community affairs specialist for the city of Bloomington, joined the trip to provide diversity training. While in Gettysburg, she said that she found the large number of Confederate flags to be offensive.
Adkins, who is black, saw three boys wearing Confederate flag necklaces and wondered if they knew that many still equate the flag with slavery.
Downs Mayor Jeff Schwartz spoke to the boys, who were participants in the project. They thought the flag was a British symbol and, after a brief discussion, decided to take off the necklaces and give them to Adkins.
Unlike Adkins, Jon Gentry of Springfield, a member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, thinks of the courage of Confederate soldiers and feels pride when he sees the flag. He says it was flown only during battles.
Gentry, who spoke to The Pantagraph on Friday, is not an official spokesman for the national organization, but his great-grandfather fought for the South, and Jefferson Davis was a distant cousin, he said.
He believes politics, not slavery, was the main cause of the secession, arguing that only one side of the Civil War is generally taught. He urged students and others to research the conflict.
"Look into it more for yourself," he said. "Draw your own conclusions."
Several days after project participants returned to Illinois, Schwartz stressed the boys' decision to remove the necklaces was their own.
"To me, rightly or wrongly, it showed an enhanced sensitivity by the kids to recognize that something they were doing, as harmless as it was in their minds' eye, was offensive to someone else," Schwartz said.
He said discussion is healthy, and he would support someone talking to the group about the flag.
Adkins wanted the boys to make their own decision. She said her reaction was a personal one. And while it was not a planned part of the diversity training, the situation presented an educational opportunity, she said.
And don't let the screen door hit you in the bum on the way out.
I also find the "Yankee imperialist" direction of our government offensive. But I'm not moving out. You see, Vladiator, it was a free country before it bacame an Imperial one, so those that choose to support the Imperial direction our national government is taking should 'move out'. Better yet, military prison sounds better.
Our government leaders, military, and law enforcement all ". . . swear to defend the Constitution of the United States . . ." Break the oath, go to jail. Simple.
Or, do you believe the adage that "might makes right?"
nonetheless, what i said about the hateful damnyankees is the truth AND they just will NOT "tend their potatoes" and leave us alone.
interestingly, the damnyankees have always been hypocrites.
SOME EXAMPLES:
they are VERY concerned about "poor children" in the south, but do little POSITIVE for the poor in THEIR cities;
the damnyankees accuse southerners of religious intolerence but NOBODY is more hateful about "non-traditional" churches than the damnyankees;
they wanted SOUTHRON schools to have busing and to desegregate in the 1950s BUT their schools are STILL segregated;
they constantly accuse southerners of bias/racism BUT openly discriminate against Jews,Asians, blacks and latinos;
they want public housing projects in OUR neighborhoods, but FIGHT tooth and nail to keep their neighboorhoods LILY-WHITE.
face it, damnyankees are ALL the things i said and MORE;it has ever been thus!
for a FREE and MUCH improved Southron Republic,sw
Awwwwwwwwwwwww ... she got offended. Well that's the price you pay for living in a free society ... you might just be offended at one time or another by what someone says or does, or even wears. Stupid b*tch needs to grow a thicker skin, stop living in the past and do more to produce free thinking individuals.
OK, Gentry (great name for a Confederate glorifier), let's see what the official position of Cousin Jeff's state was:
"Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world... There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin." (From the Mississippi Delcaration of Secesssion.)
No, I'm just reminding the Confederate glorifiers like you what they are glorifiying. It's funny how you guys always complain about "the winners writing history" and yet you never seem to pay much attention to the history written by the Confederates themselves.
Wimps.
The Supreme Court made a number of rulngs that give the lie to your statement; you have seen them cited many times:
Chisholm v. Georgia, 1793
Martin v Hunter's Lessee, 1816
McCullough v. Maryland, 1819 and
Cohens v Virginia, 1821.
Read 'em and weep.
Walt
True, but consider Lawrence Keitt;
Soon to be CSA congressman Lawrence Keitt, speaking in the South Carolina secession convention, said, "Our people have come to this on the question of slavery. I am willing, in that address to rest it upon that question. I think it is the great central point from which we are now proceeding, and I am not willing to divert the public attention from it."
Keitt was killed in action fighting for slavery. Surely that counts for something?
Walt
You detest the historical record, don't you?
You'd be better off to let sleeping dogs lie. But you're too dumb to make a habit of strictly ignoring everything I say. You'd rather stick your finger in your own eye. Not very bright.
Walt
Not many decades. The slave trade was outlawed in this country in 1808.
The reason the slave holders decided to bolt was because of changing attitudes in the United States towards slavery.
Walt
It's all straight from "1984". Freedom is slavery, union is not union, my freedom requires that I hold you as a slave.
But if the Losers (with a capital 'L') hadn't wrote at least some history, the neo-rebs wouldn't be so duped.
Walt
I would actually be smarter for ignoring your posts.
Officially yes, though there remained recurring cases of yankee slave traders smuggling them in all the way up to the Lincoln administration.
Officially yes, though there remained recurring cases of yankee slave traders smuggling them in all the way up to the Lincoln administration.
Name one.
"Frustrated in their attempts to change the law, fire-eaters turned their efforts tu breaking it. The most famous example of the illicit slave trade in the 1850's was the schooner Wanderer, owned by Charles A. L. Lamar, member of a famous and powerful southern family. La mar orgnized a syndicate that sent several ships to Africa for slaves. One of these pas the Wanderer, a fast yacht that took on a cargo .of five hundred africans in 1858. The four hundred survivors of the voyage to Georgia earned Lamar a large profit. But federal officials had got wind of the affair and arrested Lamar along with several crew members. Savannah juries acquitted all of them. The grand jurors who had indicted Lamar suffered so much vilification from the local press as dupes of Yankee imitators that they published a bizarre recantation of their action and advocated repeal of the 1807 law prohibiting the slave trade. "Longer to yield to a sickly sentiment of pretended philanthropy and diseased mental aberration of 'higher law' fanatics," said the jurors in reference to opponents of the trade, "is weak and unwise." When northerners criticized the acquittal of Lamar, a southern newspaper denounced Yankee Hypocrisy: "What is the difference between a Yankee violating the fugitive slave law in the North, and a Southern man violating . . . the law 'against the African slave trade in the South?" Lamar repurchased the Wanderer at public auction and went on with his slave-trading ventures until the Civil War, in which he was killed at the head of his regiment."
Battle Cry of Freedom, p 103, by Jaames McPhrson
Hoo ray for the noble south.
Walt
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