Posted on 03/03/2006 11:37:56 AM PST by Rebeleye
The removal of the Confederate flag from Amherst County's official seal has upset Southern heritage groups, who contend residents weren't told of the change. County officials acknowledge the image was quietly removed in August 2004 to avoid an uproar.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailypress.com ...
They'll get no argument from county officials: They acknowledge the image was quietly removed in August 2004 to avoid an uproar.
"Any time you get a subject that broad, you can interrupt the entire county," said Leon Parrish of the Board of Supervisors.
Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans and others opposed to the change have gathered hundreds of signatures protesting the flag's removal.
A small image of the flag was in the center of the seal, which was created in 1961 as part of the county's 200th anniversary. While celebrated by some, critics see the flag as a symbol of the South's segregated past and slavery.
The flag's removal came as the result of a resolution from the Board of Supervisors, according to David Proffitt, interim county administrator. A resolution does not require a public hearing.
"I don't think that the county should be promoting anything that's offensive to anyone," Parrish told The News & Advance of Lynchburg, in a story published Thursday. He said he proposed the resolution after receiving requests to do so from residents of his district.
Resident Leah Lovell said that she first discovered the flag was missing in April when she got her new county decal.
"That's the first thing I noticed," Lovell said. "It's part of our history. It affects thousands of people in the county."
At Dixie Outfitters, a Southern heritage memorabilia store in Madison Heights that prominently displays the flag on its storefront, county residents can sign petitions.
Brenda Beeton, who runs the shop with her husband, Dennis, said that she felt eliminating the flag from the seal took away a piece of Amherst County's history.
"When you change history, you burn a book, just like they did in Nazi Germany," Beeton said.
"You might as well live in Russia during the Communist regime."
Still, Parrish said that he and the board stood by their decision.
"People use the excuse that it's history, but if I want to know history, I go to the history books, not a symbol or a picture."
Revisionist BS history by the PC-cowed crowd. They're probably pressuring them to add the sodomite-homo rainbow triangle, as a sign of good faith. Sad.
So, it took almost two years before anyone even noticed? I'd guess it's not such a big deal, then.
For pete's sake...there must be more important things to deal with there in Virginia, I'd think.
"People use the excuse that it's history, but if I want to know history, I go to the history books, not a symbol or a picture."
Somehow I doubt this guy has opened a history book since he was in school.
According to this man's logic, perhap we ought to do away with every monument, museum or artifact of our nations past. Hey as long as it's written in a history book, we don't need any tangible links to the past. Sad to see that the people of this county have elected someone with such a small mind and lack of pride.
Wow. I grew up there and I never even knew there WAS a Confederate flag on the county seal.
I'm ashamed at my home folks being spineless about this. This is very sad...as much the fact that they removed it without telling anyone as anything else. If they wanted to remove it, they needed to have a public debate about it instead of sneaking around like this.
This county, by the way, is about 20 miles northwest of Appomattox, where General Lee surrendered. A lot of Amherst men fought and died in the Army of Northern Virginia (I believe they furnished a battery that served under Pickett at Gettysburg).
}:-)4
Ping for you, suh.
}:-)4
Ouch. You are really asking for it in this crowd. LOL.
Everybody (usually) has 8 Great Great Grandfathers. So I had 8 of 'em, and 7 served the whole War in the Union Army. The 8th changed sides right after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
My people won ~ those people lost. It's time for them to get over it.
Damn Yankee ! ;-P
Wow, that's quite a lineage. I had to search and search just to find ONE gggg uncle who served in the Civil War (Union). I guess I must come from a long line of draft dodgers. LOL.
So, it took almost two years before anyone even noticed? I'd guess it's not such a big deal, then.
For pete's sake...there must be more important things to deal with there in Virginia, I'd think.
Applause to you....standing ovation!!!!! I agree with you that if it took two years to notice it was gone then it was not needed. I think they need to worry about issues that are important to everybody. I know that some people don't agree with this, BUT come on 2 YEARS and wow something is missing...I don't know what, but there is something different....LOL
Then there's the fellow whose cousin or uncle was convicted for violating the Runaway Slave Act ~ I think he got involved in the Jay-Hawk War before the big one.
One of these poor fellows married a woman whose family owned Southern Maryland (for the most part) and just about everyone who lived there. They had 8 to 10 kids ~ but while he was away at war she ran off with a slacker who rode with Morgan's Raiders. His name was Cheney ~ and he ended up taking her to live with his family in Lincoln, Nebraska.
So, you just never know who's a Yankee and who isn't.
Then, too, we forget that these people had friends, cousins, and so forth, and if we can find them, we can sometimes find our own ancestor, particularly since there were many fewer people in the country 150 years ago.
As an example, one of my GGGrandfather's took pioneers West. He belonged to a peculiar church. Bill Clinton's GGGrandfather also took pioneers West. Billzo's own father belonged to that same peculiar church. So, did they know each other, work together, live in the same towns, etc?
Working backwards through Billzo's family (Blythe) it's theoretically possible to find out where my own GGGrandfather lived and what he did. (NOTE: I have more information on Billzo's family than he does because we had to do exactly that.)
Interestingly enough, his (my GGGrandfather) only son became a business partner of R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.'s Great Grandfather.
Small doggone world if you ask me ~ and it only took us 50 some years to find those little nuggets.
Seriously, I don't know of any of my ancestors who fought in the Civil War, of whom were in America were all Northerners (none of my relatives were in the South at that time, the last one, a North Carolina-born Scots-Irish having moved to Illinois from Tennessee after serving under General Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans). The earliest direct ancestor of mine in the U.S. was one of those paid Hessian mercenaries hired by the British during the Revolution, of whom made a rather bold decision to stay in America after the war was over. Most of his comrades who also chose to stay were not so lucky, as the majority of them were hunted down and murdered by New Jersey patriots following the war.
One of my Great Grandfather's, who'd been a bugler in the war played at the dedication of the Indiana Soldiers and Sailers Memorial on Monument Circle in Indianapolis.
Believe it or not I know exactly how he felt ~ I was at the first dedication of the Viet Nam Veterans Memorial. I'd feared we'd have to wait half a century too, but we didn't.
“To many Native Americans, that [American] flag is no different than the Nazi flag or the Confederate flag.”
Bennish
"accepting the conclusion of the civil rights movements."
Accepting that conclusion is one thing, destroying history because "somebody MIGHT be offended" is something else.
Had it not been for the North and oppressive "Reconstruction", the South would be a far different and better place today.
LoL. That was one "secret" which was revealed as soon as the first document was stamped.
What is next some German outraged because the Swastica has been removed from state documents?
Buncha liberal blue-zone yankee doodle bull cr@p. 1961 was the centennial of the start of The War.
Because this county has undone the work of racists RATS it will be attacked by the Defenders of Slaverocracy.
Slavery ended over 140 years ago. Get over it. It must really piss you off that we have "slave owners" on our currency.
You are almost persuasive.
"You are almost persuasive."
Well, one must keep one's sense of humor. It's hard to deny that the momentum seems to be in the direction of the historical revisionists jihad against the confederate flag, however, since they are wrong, one can't help but laugh them off.
This has now become SOP at all levels of government. Selective non-enforcement of laws, selective enforcement of laws against certain individuals or classes of individuals, sneaking legislation through in the middle of night or by pre-arranged voice vote, cozying up to the lobbyists, and on and on. Distrust of government is reaching crisis levels.
They're all playing a dangerous game.
Without the destruction of the Slaverocracy you would be speaking German or Russian.
If allowed to kill and murder Blacks at will the defeated Slavers would have forever defamed the good name of America. And that is exactly WHY the South had to be occupied by United States troops in order to protect. It is a shame that any who ever took up arms against the USA were ever allowed to hold political office again. Except for such as Mosby and Longstreet who refused to join the RAT-led assault on the ideals of the US.
I would expect something like this up in the DC area – but in the Hills of Virginia? That’s a long way to commute.
When you only use part of the quote, "which was created in 1961", it looks as if the county of Amherst (in which my husband's ancestors lived) used the controversial symbol to push segregation. However, seeing that the seal was redone as part of the county's bicentennial, that assumption loses credibility.
I'm sorry, but there was a decision taken not just to design a new emblem or to celebrate the anniversary, but to ADD a visual of the Confederate Battle Flag at a time when other jurisdictions throughout the South were doing the same thing to protest the civil rights movement and desegregation. And Amherst County was right in the thick of it, because the South had delayed integration for years after Brown v. Board of Education and the issue was coming to a head.
http://www.newsadvance.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=LNA%2FMGArticle%2FLNA_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031775482320&path=
1959 was the year when the Prince Edward County government shuttered its schools rather than integrate--a closure that lasted until 1964. Important cases were argued through 1961 and 1962 in which black student appealed for the right to attend integrated schools in Virginia. As late as 1968, Amherst County's Commonwealth's Attorney was STILL arguing that Brown v. Board of Education was not constitutional and they should not be required to integrate their schools.
So when they decide, in the middle of this fight, to add the Confederate battle flag to their county emblem, at the same time that Georgia and South Carolina raised the flag over the state capitol or incorporated it into their state flag as a gesture of defiance against desegregation, you simply can not ignore the historical context.
Obviously you need some good Southern history lessons. Shall we start with Lincoln's invasion and then move on to Sherman's holocaust?
Russian or German indeed.
Yup. Much of Virginia is rural, undeveloped and poor. It's numbers look better because of a few very wealthy counties around DC. But go a little bit south, and you're basically in Mississippi.
And I'm not talking about the charming parts of Mississippi, but the crushingly poor segments.
See that incredibly teeny-tiny little blue cross in the center of the shield? Somebody or somebodies got offended over that.
}:-)4
I'm not going to deny Amherst County's history. My brother graduated from what I believe was the last segregated senior class at the high school in 1968. I attended what once was the black Central High School (then Amherst County Junior High School, and fully integrated) in 1978-79. And yes, it was considerably smaller than the white high school...but the black population is, according to Wikipedia, about 20% of the county. So it could afford to be smaller. Yes, they fought tooth and nail against integration. I'm not proud of that.
But I'll tell you this. I lived there until I went to college in 1984, and came back from 1990 to 1993 to live in Lynchburg. I still have friends in the county and my mom lives in Lynchburg. And in that time period, strides were made in race relations that you would not believe. Interracial dating happens, and now it's no big deal anymore. It wasn't even THAT big a deal in the early 1980s when I was in high school there. I never saw evidence of racism in the school. Never. You can believe it or not, but it's the truth.
Down there, the races mix, and mingle, and work with and for each other, and nobody gives the 1950s and 1960s much of a thought anymore except when someone of the perpetually-offended class decides to squawk about a tiny St. Andrews Cross in the middle of an obscure county seal.
That's because, white or black, we're Southern. We're Virginian. And y'know, it's damned hard to explain to somebody who didn't grow up with it, but sometimes, that just trumps what color your skin is. And there's a hell of a lot of blue states and blue cities that could learn a LOT about race relations from a place like Amherst County, Virginia, regardless of what they've got in the center of their county seal.
After all, it's worth noting that that symbol was on the county seal for forty-three years before somebody complained. Oh, and as for the seal itself...y'know the only place you really ever see it? On the tax stickers that go on the windshield of every car registered in Amherst County, a new one every year. They're about, eh, four inches on a side, so the seal's probably no more than three inches on a side. You'd need a magnifying glass to spot there was a St. Andrews Cross there.
}:-)4
Let's try to keep it relatively peaceful this evening, okay?
I can totally believe it. The whole country has come a long way since the 1960s, and indeed, the north has plenty of racism.
" Crackpot history will not get you very far in understanding reality"
You should take your own illbegotten advice.
"Yup. Much of Virginia is rural, undeveloped and poor. It's numbers look better because of a few very wealthy counties around DC. But go a little bit south, and you're basically in Mississippi. "
Uh, no. I've been everywhere in Virginia. I've also been to Mississippi. Some places in Virginia are poorer than others, but Mississippi? I have to vigorously disagree with you there. Maybe at one time, yes, but not for the past 30 years.......
Why do you support the terrorists of 1861 who attacked the US if you are so opposed to them today? Jeff Davis was a greater threat to the United States than Osama despite his incompetence.
In 1861 the United States of America was the Light of the World and the envy of all right thinking people across the globe. Yet you support the Empire of the Whip and Lash with an ideology 180 degrees to the contrary of that of the Land of Liberty. And falsely believe that belief is supported by the Crackpot History laughed at among intelligent people.
I stand with Lincoln and Liberty but you are welcome to join Jeff and the Slaver clowns on the Ashheap of History among the other fallen fighters for Tyranny.
You said: My people won ~ those people lost. It's time for them to get over it.
***
I don't think anyone is threatening to re-fight the Civil War. Rather, they are attempting to preserve a bit of history. The manner in which this county made the change is an abomination to the democratic process, and it would be no matter what action is taken. These politicians should at least have had the courage of their convictions. I don't really care that much how the issue was resolved, but the process really stunk.
I often wonder how much better things would have turned out if President Lincoln had lived to oversee reconstruction and the reintegration of the South into the Union.
Terrorists who attacked the United States? Whose revising history now? The split between the North and the South was over far more than just slavery which didn't become an issue until TWO YEARS into the conflict. Obviously you've watched way too many showings of Mandingo to have an intelligent thought regarding the War of Northern Aggression.
Look, they waited doggone near a century to put that symbol in there ~ apparantly they changed their mind about the outcome of the war. That's why it's sometimes necessary to remind folks.
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