From: Michael Noe <seabear65@hotmail.com>
Date: Thu, Apr 26, 2012
Subject: RE: Mr. Edgerton
To: hk.edgerton@gmail.com
HK.
Thank you for the kind response. We have gleaned much from your southern heritage website.
You rightly described the "economic institution of slavery". Before the British turned to Africa for slaves they committed atrocities against the Irish, Scotch and street youth of England.
Google White slavery and you will see that in America and throughout the British colonies poor whites were rounded up, beaten, killed, shackeled together in the belly of ships, raped, and bred like cattle, and auctioned off to work for the "gentry".
During the overlap of white and black slavery. Black slaves commanded on average 10 times more and were considered superior to "red necks" & "white trash" by the wealthy owners.
Some of my family were of Scotch-Irish descent. Many in NC and the southern state at the time of the War remembered the white slavery and had no affinity for the "economic institution" of slavery and were not rascist then or now.
Many family stories from mine and my wife’s of beloved black friends and family going back to the civil war and beyond. Including Ma Rose who like the ficitional mammy in "Gone with the Wind" ran the household and had no affinity for her "yankee liberators". She raised my wife’s great grandmother and uncle as her own two children when their died in childbirth with her last child.
Ma Rose hated yankees for burning her home and livelihood to the ground on the VA/NC border during the War forcing them to flee to the NC coast with the clothes on their back.
My first memory of racism and the "N" word was traveling through Ohio at the age of 6 and later as a social worker intern in Philadelphia in the late 1980s.
I had to explain the reality of racism to young black teen males in a youth meeting. The city of "brotherly love" was and is quite segregated racically. and for these young men crossing the wrong street would literally get them beaten or killed by Italian or Irish gangs. As a white male looking an innocent young mans tear filled eyes and try to answer him "why Mr. Mike do they hate me and want to hurt me?" brought me to tears as well.
I learned recently that segregation was the official policy of the Federal government post Civil war in the south and the reality in the North to this day.
What America lost was a lot of important history and culture as revisionist historians painted a greatly skewed picture of the South and it’s predominant protestant Christian values.
We appreciate your courage and that of Terry Lee’s.
God bless,
Mike Noe & Family.
