The water fountain and the flag (MS)

[struggle4progress]

By Jim High
Published: Wednesday, August 12, 2015 12:13 PM CDT

... I graduated from Tupelo High School four years later in 1958 without ever a black person attending Tupelo High School ... It took Federal Troops and a riot on campus leaving two dead for James Meredith to be admitted as a student at Ole Miss in Oxford. Go to both universities today and to Tupelo High School today and you will see the result of all that controversy, which is that civil rights and progress cannot be stopped ...

I was at the first Board of Directors meeting of the bank’s stockholders after the Supreme Court’s ruling about public accommodations to represent my family’s stock holdings in the bank. At the close of the short formal meeting the bank’s president asked the three stockholders present if we had any comments to make. I stood up and said yes I had a question. “Why after the passage of the Civil Rights Act last year does our bank still have a sign above the water fountain in the lobby that says “Whites Only?” Well there was great rustling of papers and clearing of throats and someone said “move we adjourn” and they did. No one said anything to me and my question was not answered.

But the next day the sign and the old water fountain were removed and a new water fountain that required the use of paper cups was installed ...

Now fifty years later, I have another question. “When is the State of Mississippi going to remove the old Confederate Battle Flag, which has become a symbol of hate, racism and white power, from our state flag?” People will tell you it represents our heritage and state’s rights and honors our relatives who fought in the Civil War, but all this is untrue. My great grandfather’s name is on the Confederate Monument with his four brothers, who all fought to secede from the United States of America, not because they owned slaves, they were not rich enough to own slaves, but for the silly notion that Mississippi had the right to say what people in Mississippi could and couldn’t do to other people. My Allen ancestors did own slaves. Certain parts of my heritage on both sides is not worthy of celebration today ...

http://www.leecountycourier.net/articles/2015/08/13/opinion/doc55cb7e552fd8f622482332.txt

[TexasProgresive]

1. It is an unfounded myth that all southerners were pro slavery and secession.

No group of people in any place or time are a monolith of belief. The majority may think one way but there will always be dissenters.

https://renegadesouth.wordpress.com/about/
As the blog’s title, Renegade South, suggests, I study southern dissenters of the nineteenth century. Several kinds of renegades pass through the pages of my books and articles: Civil War Unionists and outlaws, multiracial people, unruly women, and political and religious nonconformists. My books, The Free State of Jones, Unruly Women, and The Long Shadow of the Civil War, highlight such folks in the Mississippi Piney Woods, North Carolina Piedmont, and the “Big Thicket” region of Hardin County, Texas.

It’s often hard to imagine that many white southerners opposed secession and served only grudgingly in the Confederate Army, if at all. Yet many did. Throughout the South, many put family, neighborhood, or religious and political beliefs ahead of secession. Many, in fact, hated the Confederacy with a passion, so much so that their backyards ran red with blood. Wherever they rose up, Confederates countered with deadly force. This sparked inner civil wars such as the one in Mississippi known as the Free State of Jones.

Many people who contact me have recently learned that a southern great-great-grandfather opposed or abandoned the Confederacy, or even joined the Union army. Others have found a long-departed relative in one of my books, and are intrigued by what they’ve read about his or her life. Others merely hope that readers of Renegade South can help them solve a family mystery, and often they can. Whatever the reason, I truly enjoy being a people’s historian, and I especially love the thrill of discovering—and then being in a position to share—that ordinary people at times do extraordinary things.

[struggle4progress]

2. In NC, not even a majority was pro-secession. NC voters had, in a referendum in early 1861,

simultaneously voted a majority of unionists as delegates to a proposed state convention on secession and then, at the same time, voted against calling the convention. The governor several months later called a convention himself and packed it with slave-holders, with the additional instruction that the matter not be again put to popular vote: the convention promptly voted to secede

[malaise]

3. Excellent read

Thanks