From Sons of Confederate Veterans Headquarters, Elm Springs, Tennessee
Press Release – March 8, 2007 – For Immediate Release

For information contact:
J. A. Davis
Public-Media Relations Committee
Sons of Confederate Veterans
770 297-4788
Gainesville, Georgia

Responding to an Associated Press story which ran nationally, Christopher M. Sullivan, Commander in Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, issued the following statement:

We note with interest the revelation that Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has slave owners in his ancestry. This news demonstrates an interesting irony with respect to contemporary multi-cultural American politics.

For candidate Obama, the news is perhaps more complex since his African roots may link him to African tribes that traded their brothers and sisters into slavery.

"While a relative owned slaves, another fought for the Union in the Civil War." Obama spokesman Bill Burton said.

This is perhaps the most ironic aspect of this story. It is not inconsistent with American history as a number of the Union states continued slavery until after the War Between the States ended. Some Union military and citizenry held slaves, traded in slaves and were solely responsible for trans Atlantic slave shipping enterprises, all of which operated under the U. S. flag.

It matters not if a man has either slave trading or slave holding, or both, in his family background. He is not accountable for that. That which he is responsible for is how he conducts himself in today’s continuing slavery. We wonder where Senator Obama stands regarding a positive solution to the 27 million people currently in bondage throughout the world, according to the United Nations?

Robert E. Lee said "Few can say anything other than slavery is a moral and political evil." The Southern Confederacy, any more than the Union slave states, cannot be accountable for the slavery that exists today. Rather than distorting and pointing guilt for occurrences almost 150 years in the past, we should all mutually focus on slavery’s current existence and unity in ending human slavery forever.

END

On The Web: http://georgiaheritagecouncil.org/site2/news/SCVpress030807.phtml