Free Republic

LeVar Burton got a glimpse into his lineage in “Finding Your Roots” and discovered something about his ancestors that shocked him. The former “Reading Rainbow” host, freedom-to-read advocate and actor knew little about his lineage. He’d been estranged from his father, Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, since he was 11, and his mother, Erma Gene Christian, had been tight-lipped about her own history. Burton said it was “impossible” to get her to open-up about her upbringing.

The newly elected Democrat mayor of Jacksonville, Florida, celebrated the removal of a Confederate statue in the city, which was officially gone before noon Wednesday. Democrat Mayor Donna Deegan, who won her mayoral bid in May, celebrated the removal of the statue in Springfield Park, formally known as Confederate Park. The monument in question, “In Memory of Our Women of the Southland,” depicts a mother with her two children at her side, looking down at a book upon her lap. It was erected in October 1915. The Democrat mayor, who said during her time on the campaign trail that she...

A group of Republican lawmakers are attempting to stop the Pentagon from taking out a Confederate monument belonging to Arlington National Cemetery.Led by Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-GA), the group of lawmakers penned a letter to Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Monday that demands he leaves the Reconciliation Monument, also known as the Confederate Memorial untouched until at least the conclusion of the fiscal year 2024 appropriations process.The monument was set to be taken out by the Pentagon’s Naming Commission, a group formed to rename and remove military installations named after the Confederacy. This came in the wake of the 2020...

The newly-elected mayor of Jacksonville has allocated $500,000 in the Florida city’s budget to remove a monument dedicated to women who lost loved ones serving in the Confederate army. Donna Deegan — a progressive Democrat who toppled her Republican opponent in Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ backyard — had pledged to topple the monument and lined up the dollars to do so. “We are looking at all potential options and Mayor Deegan remains committed to removing the Springfield Park monument,” her spokesperson, Philip Perry, tweeted. Erected in 1915, the monument is one of the last Confederate memorials remaining in Jacksonville, the...

The measure states that any person or entity that damages, destroys or removes a monument or memorial located on publicly owned property may be subject to civil liability, where they may be required up to three times the actual or compensatory damages. The bill also says that if a memorial or monument is relocated, “it must be relocated to a site of similar prominence, honor, visibility and access” within the same county or city of where it was originally located. There have been more than two dozen Confederate memorials removed in Florida since 2015, according to a 2022 report from...

It doesn’t matter who is buried, digging up the dead body of anyone laid to rest (besides forensic investigators cracking a cold case) is extremely disrespectful. Richmond, Virginia Democrat Mayor LeVar Stoney ordered a grounds crew to dig up the decomposed body of Confederate General AP Hill. The move by Stoney comes a day after General AP Hill’s statue was taken down and due to his statue being used as a tombstone, his body was removed the very next day.

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A plane once again flew the Confederate flag around downtown Jacksonville on Tuesday morning. Action News Jax told you when a similar thing happened Nov. 27 before the Jaguars-Ravens game at TIAA Bank Field.

Pictures were colorized and enhanced using AI optimization software. For the audio, I remastered it using noise gate, compression, loudness normalization, EQ and a Limiter. Julius Franklin Howell (January 17, 1846 - June 19, 1948) joined the Confederate Army when he was 16. After surviving a few battles, he eventually found himself in a Union prison camp at Point Lookout, Maryland. In 1947, at the age of 101, Howell made this recording at the Library of Congress. Our new music channel - Life in the Music: Classic Collections 2-hour videos of music from the 1600s-1900s https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC24p... Audio has been restored...

PHILADELPHIA, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Three years before retiring from the U.S. Army in 2017, Donald Trump-backed Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano posed in Confederate uniform for a faculty photo at the Army War College, according to a copy of the photo obtained by Reuters. The previously unreported photo, released by the War College to Reuters after a request under the Freedom of Information Act, showed Mastriano in a 2013-14 portrait for the Department of Military Strategy, Plans, and Operations, where he worked. Faculty at the time had been given the option of dressing as a historical figure, people familiar...

A veteran Russian diplomat to the U.N. Office at Geneva says he handed in his resignation before sending out a scathing letter to foreign colleagues inveighing against the “aggressive war unleashed” by President Vladimir Putin in Ukraine. Boris Bondarev, 41, confirmed his resignation in a letter delivered Monday morning at the Russian diplomatic mission after a diplomatic official passed on his English-language statement to The Associated Press. “For twenty years of my diplomatic career I have seen different turns of our foreign policy, but never have I been so ashamed of my country as on Feb. 24 of this year,”...

CNN anchor Jake Tapper said Sunday on his show “State of the Union” that the statues of Confederate leaders in Congress are “tributes to traders” that honor political violence like the events of January 6, 2021. Tapper said, “On Thursday night, the one-year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol, CNN hosted an event at the Capitol to talk about that horrible day.”

A black man in Tennessee will get a new trial after being convicted by an all-white jury who deliberated in a room adorned with Confederate symbols. Tim Gilbert, who was sentenced to six years in prison in 2020 for aggravated assault and other charges stemming from a December 2018 dispute, was granted a new trial Friday by the Tennessee Court of Criminal Appeals. An attorney for Gilbert argued his right to a fair trial was violated because the jury deliberated in a room at the Giles County courthouse with an antique Confederate flag and a portrait of Confederate President Jefferson...

Middle Peninsula voters overwhelmingly want to keep their Confederate monuments, according to results of advisory referendums in Mathews and Middlesex counties. Mathews voters rejected a proposal to relocate the county’s Soldier’s & Sailor’s Monument on its court green at the corner of Court and Church streets by 3,778, or 80% of ballots cast, to 939, or 20%. In Middlesex, the vote against moving its Civil War Monument from the courthouse grounds in Saluda was 3,229, or 75% of ballots cast, to 1,076.

Joe Biden: The Great Unifier Joe Biden on Tuesday traveled to Philadelphia in a panic after PA Senator Doug Mastriano initiated a full forensic audit in several counties. Trump won Pennsylvania in a massive landslide on Election Day but the crooked Democrat elections officials stopped counting votes and refused to declare Trump the winner. Democrat officials in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia counted more than 1.5 million ballots in secret, handing Biden a ‘win’ two weeks after the election.

Bronze statutes of two Confederate generals are being taken from public property in Charlottesville, Virginia, on Saturday, almost four years after they were a flashpoint for a violent "Unite the Right" rally that left one person dead. Heavy machinery lifted a statue of Robert E. Lee in Market Street Park from its stone base around 8 a.m. A crowd that gathered to watch clapped and cheered.

"On May 27th, KCSO Special Operations Division intercepted a message indicating that Blevins was preparing to proceed with a mass shooting. In the message, Mr. Blevins made a specific threat that included WalMart. Working with the FBI, KCSO Investigators confirmed Mr. Blevins' capability of following through with the threat and moved immediately to arrest him,"

Ever since the craze of trying to erase the nation’s history by tearing down monuments that some people find offensive got started, there have been repeated demands to “do something” about Stone Mountain Confederate monument in Georgia. Unlike some of the typical statues that cities erect that can be dragged down during a riot with some ropes and chains, however, this one isn’t so easy for protesters to tackle. For one thing, it’s gigantic. It takes up three acres of space and it’s literally carved into the side of a mountain, as the name suggests. It depicts Jefferson Davis, Robert...

Link only (Gannett): https://www.timesunion.com/news/article/Court-orders-upstate-woman-to-remove-Confederate-16156632.php

Maryland’s state song, “Maryland, My Maryland,” a controversial ballad with lyrics that celebrate the Confederacy and that many consider to be racist, will not be played in Baltimore next month when the second leg of the Triple Crown runs at Pimlico Race Course.

A group of Alabama cheerleaders have come under fire for posing with a T-shirt bearing the image of the Confederate flag that said 'I love Redneck Boys'. The white members of the squad were slammed by Reagan Coleman, a black cheerleader on the team who has since quit. The controversial photo shows six white girls, four of whom are Daphne High School cheerleaders.