NAACP Wrong

Re: "NAACP Wrong to Target Athletes"

From: colonel@37thtexas.org
To: rona@free-times.com

http://www.free-times.com/index.php?cat=1992912064035856&ShowArticle_ID=11003001071668648
I am always amazed by people who do not have a clue when it comes to Southern history or slavery and make the absolutely erroneous comparison between the Confederacy and Nazism. As a matter of fact the more correct comparison would be between the Union and Nazism.

You insult Jews when you compare American slavery to the Holocaust. Were there Death Camps where multiple millions of people were gassed, starved, experimented upon and ultimately incinerated in wholesale lots? Was there a concerted effort to exterminate a race of people? Absolutely not.

American slavery, which was established in Virginia in 1652 by the lawsuit of a Black man suing for lifetime servitude of another Black man, was relatively benign once you get past the estimate 250,000 to one million deaths of the "Middle Passage" where New England slave ships discarded their dying cargos. Even after the importation of slaves was forbidden their numbers increased with a birth and survival rate greater than that of the free white population and in Alabama in 1840 slaves were six times more likely to reach the age of 100 than free whites.

In the South in 1860 there were a quarter of a million Free People of Color with 64,000 of them living in Virginia alone, listed by the U.S. Census as homeowners, business owners and slave owners despite the existence of a "Black Code" which forbade them to live there at all. In comparison, Illinois had added a "Black Code" to their state Constitution in 1856 and even in 1863, after the "Emancipation Proclamation," they were arresting and sometimes selling into slavery Free Black and Colored for the "crime" of living in the state longer than ten days - the last of these "criminals" was not pardoned and freed until 1883.

Which was a police state - the Union or the Confederacy? Consider the following:

"Among the unconstitutional and dictatorial acts performed by Lincoln were initiating and conducting a war by decree for months without the consent or advice of Congress; declaring martial law; confiscating private property; suspending habeas corpus; conscripting the railroads and censoring telegraph lines; imprisoning as many as 30,000 Northern citizens without trial; deporting a member of Congress, Clement L. Vallandigham of Ohio, after Vallandigham - a fierce opponent of the Morrill tariff -- protested imposition of an income tax at a Democratic Party meeting in Ohio; and shutting down hundreds of Northern newspapers." - "Constitutional Problems under Lincoln," James G. Randall, 1951, Urbana: University of Illinois Press

In 1860 Lincoln also supported a Constitutional Amendment to forever protect slavery and in December, 1862, offered the South gradual compensated emancipation with slavery lasting until 1900.

Which of the two had a military more representative of its population? The Union allowed Blacks only as servants and orderlies until 1863 while the South's history included the following:

"Almost fifty years before the (Civil) War, the South was already enlisting and utilizing Black manpower, including Black commissioned officers, for the defense of their respective states. Therefore, the fact that Free and slave Black Southerners served and fought for their states in the Confederacy cannot be considered an unusual instance, rather continuation of an established practice with verifiable historical precedence." - "The African-American Soldier: From Crispus Attucks to Colin Powell" by Lt. Col [Ret.] Michael Lee Lanning, Birch Lane Press (June 1997)

The Union Army - a sea of lily-white faces by law - faced an unsegregated Confederate Army which included 13,000 Indians (one a Brigadier General), 6500 Hispanics (nine of them Colonels), 3500 Jews (including the Confederate Secretary of State), tens of thousands of immigrants, Filipinos from Louisiana descended from those brought there by the Spaniards, two Amerasian sons of Chang and Eng (the first "Siamese Twis") and an unknown but considerable number of Black Confederate combat soldiers some of who were regularly enlisted.

"Robert (Uncle Bob) Wilson, Negro veteran of the Confederate army who observed his 112th birthday last January 13, died early yesterday morning in the veterans' hospital at the Elgin State hospital...He enlisted as a private in Company H of the 16th regiment of Virginia Infantry on Oct. 9, 1862 and discharged May 31, 1863." - Elgin (Illinois) Daily Courier-News, Monday, April 12, 1948

The so-called "Emancipation Proclamation" of 1863 freed exactly no one and slavery continued as legal under Federal law in the Union slave sattes of Kentucky, West Virginia and Delaware until December, 1865, some eight months after Lee surrendered. This means that the last slave nation in North America was the United States of America, not the Confederate States of America.

One finaly note - the only official flag of the Ku Klux Klan and the flag which flew by the thousands when more than 100,000 robed Klansmen paraded through Washington, DC., in 1926 is the flag of the United States of America.

Try history and try thinking a little deeper...you might find it refreshing.

Through painstaking research and thorough, uncommented documentation we celebrate the courage, sacrifice, and heritage of ALL Southerners who had to make agonizing personal choices under impossible circumstances.

"The first law of the historian is that he shall never dare utter an untruth. The second is that he shall suppress nothing that is true. Moreover, there shall be no suspicion of partiality in his writing, or of malice." - Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

We simply ask that all act upon the facts of history. We invite your questions.

Your Obedient Servant,

Colonel Michael Kelley, CSA
Commanding, 37th Texas Cavalry (Terrell's)
http://www.37thtexas.org

"We are a band of brothers!"

". . . . political correctness has replaced witch trials and communist hearings as the preferred way to torment our fellow countrymen." "Ghost Riders," Sharyn McCrumb, 2004, Signet, pp. 9

"I came here as a friend...let us stand together. Although we differ in color, we should not differ in sentiment." - LT Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest, CSA, Memphis Daily Avalanche, July 6, 1875

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