May 3, 2017 3 min read

Though most have no doubt moved on – it has been 152 years, after all – some folks in the South clearly are still fighting the Civil War.

You have those who give the Confederate flag equal footing with the stars and stripes, and the removal of Civil War monuments continues to draw bands of protesters.

In Alabama, it appears children still are being indoctrinated to honor the memory of the Confederacy. According to a recent Associated Press report, thousands of schoolchildren are taken every year to visit the First White House of the Confederacy in Montgomery, where they “learn that its famous former resident, President Jefferson Davis, was leader of a ‘heroic resistance’ and was ‘held by his Negroes in genuine affection as well as highest esteem.'”

Since Davis’ “Negroes” have long since passed, we have no way of assessing their true feelings about the man who enslaved them, but we certainly question putting romantic notions into schoolchildren’s heads when it comes to the Confederacy.

Said Heidi Beirich, who directs the hate-watching Intelligence Project at Southern Poverty Law Center, “You’re essentially giving money to push historical narratives that we haven’t heard since the Klan era in the 1920s.”

The AP said on a recent visit to the museum, fourth-graders from a rural school in southern Alabama “heard about the importance of the South’s cotton economy and learned how to spin raw clumps of the stuff onto wooden spools, but were told little about the slaves whose forced labor drove the textile industry.”

State Sen. Hank Sanders, a Selma Democrat, said the house is costing taxpayers more than $100,000 a year to operate, and is presenting a skewed version of history that ignores African-Americans.

“What I would like to see is the whole story be told from all sides,” he told the AP.

But the museum, and its take on history, has its supporters.

One of them is Mary Dix, who helps to manage a collection of about 100,000 Davis-related documents. She calls him a “good person” who was morally opposed to slavery but thought its abolition would destroy the South’s economy. And she told the AP there’s even solid evidence Davis made nice with a “man-servant” over cigars during a trip into the Midwestern frontier.

So, you see, Jeff Davis wasn’t a racist. He had a black friend! In fact, he held black folks in such high regard he was laying the groundwork for them to be productive, full-fledged citizens of the Confederate States of America. So says a pamphlet available at the Confederate White House, which tells us that Davis believed whites were preparing their African friends for freedom by “submitting” them to “Anglo-Saxon culture and Christianity.” Never mind that they had their own culture and spiritual beliefs before they were abducted from their homelands.

Bernard Simelton, president of the Alabama chapter of the NAACP, seems to hit the nail on the head when he says, “It’s certainly a part of history that doesn’t deserve a positive reflection. It is akin to recognizing and celebrating the Holocaust.”

We firmly believe schoolchildren should be well-versed in American history, but they shouldn’t be subjected to a state-sanctioned-and-promoted, carefully curated whitewashing of one of the most terrible and destructive periods in our nation’s past.