From: Albritton, Kermit <Albritton.K@monet.k12.ca.us>
Date: Tue, Jun 21, 2011
Subject: RE: Black Confederates
To: HK Edgerton <hk.edgerton@gmail.com>
Thank you my brother for this enlightening treatment of the great cover-up. I meet with these revised historical portrayals on a regular basis as a California, public school teacher and what saddens me the most is that it is so deeply rooted in the American ideology, that there is no motivation for students or their parents to know anything any different. “The South lost, get over it.” Well, “The North Lied, deal with it.” Is my reply. I had been feed lies all my educational life, until I studied to be enlightened.
I was explaining to my Black cousin, Walter Woodley last Summer, that as a Confederate Re-enactor, that I was not advocating the war was to win back slavery for the South, but to rid it from the invading Yankees. He was amazed that the history that he had leaned and the opinion perpetuated in the Black subculture was so brain washed. As a re-enactor, I have met many Black individuals who understand what the war was about and side predominately as Southern; and why would they do such a thing? They have studied history, not just regurgitated the bastardized opinion of the federal government.
I have a Thursday morning men’s group that I attend, deep in the heart of our local Black community. I also have a window sticker, stating, “I am a proud descendent of a Confederate Veteran” I used to be greeted each morning by the Pastor, within whose church we have the men’s study, now it does not seem the case and the light conversation will often turn to the Slavery issue, since his parking behind my pickup. My response has been stated a number of different times over the last few weeks: I believe that slavery was a sin and the first, greatest sin of this country since its creation; the second was Lincoln’s emancipation, in 1862. Not only did it do nothing to ameliorate the sin of Slavery, it created a falseness that exists even to this very day, because it gave freedom to no-one. What few people realize is that the war was fought by the poor. What they also fail to see is that conditions were not much different for enslaved Black men and women and poor white men and women. Two things that I have shared with a lot of Black Americans is simply this, I was reared in poverty and through education, I gained prosperity, the first in my family since the Albritton Patriarch arrival at a Florida penal colony in 1735, in chains, to work as a slave until his debt was paid to the British crown. He was a poor Irishman and he was not able to make a decent living for his family until my generation, when I along with my sister graduated from College.
My great, great grandfather, Asa Travis Albritton did not go to war at age 33, with a wife and child left behind, to keep slaves, he was a poor Georgia dirt farmer who fought the Yankee to keep him out of his country. At the end of the war, with nothing left, he moved the family to Paradise Texas, where he died at age seventy five, an old man, gaunt and weary from his labors. The only thing that I was given was an opportunity to become a better man, but I did have to earn it all by myself. In light of the “reconstruction of the South” it was nothing more than an attempt at rewriting the truth and teaching Southerners that they were the bad guys. I am a proud Southern man, an American by birth and heritage.
I tire so of this entitlement mentality that I see so rampant in my community; where White and mostly White Americans are to owe a debt to Black Americans because of the sin of Slavery. The only entitlement that I recognize as being owed to anyone in this great land of ours, is the right to be a better man. I believe that if we levied that as the only entitlement in this country, then it would be the America that you and I grew up in HK. You my brother and I are on the same quest. Correcting the ill-writing of history and educating the members of our nation in the truth. God bless you brother,
Kermit
