Tag: james meredith

Times change…. Historian’s belief in Lost Cause doesn’t

“Whatever the motive behind secession, once the war began the overwhelming number of Confederate soldiers, most of whom were non­ slaveholders, fought to defend their states, homes, and families from the invading federal armies. Such was the case with my four great uncles, poor dirt farmers who owned no slaves. Two served as privates in North Carolina infantry regiments and two carried the mail for the Confederacy. One of the former was killed in Pickett’s Charge and the other died during the Peninsular Campaign of 1862, thus becoming two of the 40,000 North Carolinians who paid the ultimate price fighting under the now much-maligned Confederate battle flag….

“I am proud of my Confederate heritage and proud to live in a state that still recognizes that heritage in its state banner.”

— From “Heritage, not hate. Let’s keep the state flag” by William K. Scarborough in the Jackson Clarion-Ledger

An 84-year-old white Mississippian defending the Confederate flag may qualify as dog-bites-man, but Bill Scarborough is also an accomplished academic whose doctorate and bachelor’s degree are from UNC Chapel Hill and whose papers occupy 27 feet of shelf space in the Southern Historical Collection. 

Scarborough’s op-ed column threw me back to 1970, when I interviewed him for the micromonthly Mississippi Freelance. 

In his Confederate-flag-draped office at the University of Southern Mississippi we talked about his recent stump speeches (“I’m a segregationist, no apologies, no denials”), his brief and unhappy tenure at Millsaps College (“It had assumed that since I was a Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina that I’d be fairly liberal”) and most viscerally his fond recollection of the James Meredith crisis that wracked the state in 1962:

“The Citizens Council issued a call for men to surround the Governor’s Mansion; they had heard the federal marshals would try to arrest him [Ross Barnett]. It was great. The women brought lunches and chairs, and there was patriotic music coming over the loudspeakers…Emotionally, it was the high spot of my life. For the first time I could really see how the Civil War took place….”

So, no, I wasn’t surprised to see Scarborough’s attachment to the Confederacy undiminished by the intervening 47 years….

 

Jesse Helms once found a lot to like in Harvey Gantt

On this day in 1963: Jesse Helms, editorialist for Raleigh’s WRAL-TV, reacts to Harvey Gantt’s entrance into Clemson University:

“He has stoutly resisted the pose of a conquering hero for the forces of integration. He simply wants, he says, to be an architect — and Clemson is the only college in South Carolina that can teach him how to be one.

“He has rejected the fanfare and trappings of the NAACP. He has turned away from the liberal press and television networks which would glorify him. He has refused to make pompous speeches and statements.

“If ever a man put his best foot forward, Harvey Gantt has done so. His conduct will not cause South Carolinians to relish court orders relating to integration. But he has done a great deal, probably more than he himself realizes, to establish respectful communications across sensitive barriers in human relations.”

Helms goes on to cast Gantt and James Meredith, who desegregated the University of Mississippi in 1962, as “a study in contrasts. Meredith as a man handpicked as the showpiece of forced integration, Meredith as a man who never quite persuaded anybody that he was really interested in an education, Meredith as a man constantly and piously parading before the microphone and television cameras . ”

By 1990, when Gantt runs for Helms’ U.S. Senate seat, Meredith’s idiosyncratic career path will have led him to a job in Helms’ Washington office.