The Daily Grand and Sundry

Shirley Sherrod, whose father was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan, was fired from her Department of Agriculture position, because of an edited version of her speech.

Columnist Maureen Dowd,from the New York Times, on The Shirley Sherrod Affair:

 “The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one. ”

Ms Dowd longs for Bill Clinton, “(he) never needed help fathoming Southern black culture.”

The continued mishandling of Black-White relations in this country by the President comes from a simple fact. The first Black President in American History does not have a drop of slave blood in his veins, or bloodlines, or consciousness.

He really doesn’t know anything about America outside of the Ivy League and Chicago politics. He has no idea of GRACE, as practiced in America. It was incumbent on the first black President of the USA to develop a gravitas of moral authority on this issue; President Obama has failed to do that.

We all know who should have been the first Black President of the United States, and that was Jackie Robinson; with courage, Jackie could make a grown racist change his habits. That is the definition of Grace in this country. 

“Photo provided by bassosfamily.com”
“Dodger greats Jackie Robinson and Pee Wee Reese”

She said of the poignant moment when Reese hugged her husband as a show of support, “I wanted to hug him. For everything he did for Jack, and for my family.”

Reese was an eight-time All Star who played on seven pennant winners and one World Series champion in Brooklyn. He died at age 81 after a two-year fight with lung cancer.

The book, Teammates, the story of Reese and Robinson’s friendship, is used in elementary schools today, to teach children about racial tolerance.

Carl Erskine, a pitcher on the team, also remembered Reese’s role in helping Robinson break the color line in baseball. “Think of the guts that took,” he said. “Pee Wee had to go home (to segregated Louisville) and answer to his friends…I told Jackie later that (Reese’s gesture) helped my race more than his.”

Joe Black, a former Brooklyn pitcher and one of the first Blacks in Major League Baseball, said, “Pee Wee helped make my boyhood dream come true to play in the Majors, the World Series. When Pee Wee reached out to Jackie, all of us in the Negro League smiled and said it was the first time that a White guy had accepted us.”

He continued, “When I finally got up to Brooklyn, I went to Pee Wee and said, `Black people love you. When you touched Jackie, you touched all of us.’ With Pee Wee, it was No. I on his uniform and No. 1 in our hearts.”

“The relationship between the two players began shortly after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier in 1947. Reese, the club’s shortstop and team captain, who grew up in the segregated South, steadfastly refused to sign the petition and even went against friends and some family in accepting Robinson.

 Reese Putting His Arm Around Robinson

 Then, during a game in Cincinnati in May 1947, with Robinson facing death threats and the taunts of racist hecklers, Reese went out of his way to support Robinson by publicly walking  over and putting his arm around his teammate’s shoulders. “

What President Obama fails to understand is that  Race Relations in America has never been about a rapprochement between white liberals and black folks. That’s Oprah crap. Race Relations in America,  as in the case of the courage of Pee Wee Reese and Jackie Robinson, has always been about AMAZING GRACE, the redemption of white racists. Frederick Douglass understood that, Martin Luther King understood that; Shirley Sherrod understands that.

The key point of electing the first black American President was not so he could enjoy flying about on AIR FORCE ONE, but to leave a permanent moral distaste against racism in the mouths of American racists. President Obama has failed in a key aspect of his job, the projection of moral authority, especially as it concerns Race Relations.

How could that have been accomplished?

The first person ever to have been invited to the White House should have been Rachel Robinson, the widow of Jackie Robinson.

The first Fourth of July of the Obama Presidency should have been spent, with President Obama and his family laying a wreathe at Fort Pillow, Tennessee, the site of the infamous Fort Pillow massacre, where Nathan Bedford Forrest massacred black Union troops, who had surrendered.

When I was developing my Civil War screenplay, THE BURDEN OF HEAVEN, I went to Fort Pillow; it is ghost ridden. There, amid the ghosts of both the murdered and the murderers, Obama, the first black American President, should have stood and sung out with his family, that hymn written by a slave ship captain who became a minister, AMAZING GRACE.

, “Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me.
I once was lost but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.”

President Obama should exorcise the sins of Nathan Bedford Forrest, has to be done. And it should have been done before he accepted a Nobel Peace Prize.

Mr. President, Go to where the ghosts are, find them and show them how far America has come. Have courage when you are among the ghosts.

SIDEBAR

THE FORT PILLOW MASSACRE

“… in his Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant, who was not present at the battle, wrote of the battle:

“Forrest, however, fell back rapidly, and attacked the troops at Fort Pillow, a station for the protection of the navigation of the Mississippi River. The garrison consisted of a regiment of colored troops, infantry, and a detachment of Tennessee cavalry. These troops fought bravely, but were overpowered.

 I will leave Forrest in his dispatches to tell what he did with them.”The river was dyed,” he [Forrest] says, “with the blood of the slaughtered for two hundred yards. The approximate loss was upward of five hundred killed, but few of the officers escaping. My loss was about twenty killed. It is hoped that these facts will demonstrate to the Northern people that negro soldiers cannot cope with Southerners.” Subsequently, Forrest made a report in which he left out the part which shocks humanity to read.”

We began this blog with a quote from Maureen Dowd of the New York Times;let us end this Blog with a dispatch from The New York Times reported on April 24, 1864:

The blacks and their officers were shot down, bayoneted and put to the sword in cold blood… . Out of four hundred negro soldiers only about twenty survive! At least three hundred of them were destroyed after the surrender! This is the statement of the rebel General Chalmers himself to our informant.”

 

Fort Pillow, where the ghosts are

For the Sarah Palin/Confederate side of our Homeric Civil War, may I suggest the Reader read the following Blog.

http://gerrymaxeyworkshop.com/blogging/?p=2542

 

This is the first of two blogs about the American Civil War; they are in response to the Governor of Virginia declaring April, Confederate History Month in Virginia.

America has a living, breathing, bestriding  ghost  in the house, the American Civil War. It just won’t go away. It lives in the attic, the basement,the living room,  the bedroom. It is ubiquitous and ever lasting; the question is, why?

The Governor of Virginia just invited the ghost to dinner, again. He has just issued a Proclamation  declaring April, Confederate History month in Virginia.

This is the Proclamation, edited.

 WHEREAS, April is the month in which the people of Virginia joined the Confederate States of America in a four year war between the states for independence that concluded at Appomattox Courthouse; and

WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to reflect upon our Commonwealth’s shared history, to understand the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War, and to recognize how our history has led to our present; and

WHEREAS, all Virginians can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army, the surviving, imprisoned and injured Confederate soldiers gave their word and allegiance to the United States of America, and returned to their homes and families to rebuild their communities in peace, following the instruction of General Robert E. Lee of Virginia, who wrote that, “…all should unite in honest efforts to obliterate the effects of war and to restore the blessings of peace.”;  

My Security Man, when I worked in Defense, had grown up in Indiana;  as a boy of seven,he had run errands for aged Civil War Veterans.  He told me the stories they had told him.

I know many Southerners, have had many  discussions,both sober and drunk,  on the war with  devotees of the Lost Cause.  I have gotten to know a direct descendant of General Stonewall Jackson.

I do have an opinion on why the ghost still lives; but first the Proclamation itself.

The Governor uses the Southern terminology for the War when the Proclamation calls it the War Between the States, which shades the reason why the Proclamation thinks the South lost the War. “can appreciate the fact that when ultimately overwhelmed by the insurmountable numbers and resources of the Union Army…”

It took me almost a decade to research and write my Civil War story, THE BURDEN OF HEAVEN; in the course of that odyssey, I came to have minimal respect for Jefferson Davis, Alexander Stephens and Edmund Ruffin.

When all those Southerners started the War, they believed they could win the war, and they had good reason to believe that.They had a martial soldiery, honed by service in the Slave Patrol, and excellent generalship. Cromwell had won with less.

Shelby Foote, whom I worship, stated on a PBS interview that the South never had a chance to win the war. I respectfully disagree. The South should have won the war between 1861 and 1863, and they could have won it except for one intangible, and that intangible was named Abraham Lincoln.

Four men ran for the Presidency in 1860; only the election of one would have started a Civil War. That man was elected, that is the God’s joke on the nation.

God’s joke on the South is that only one  man could have saved the Union during the Civil War, and that singular man was the one elected President.

The masses of the Union Army don’t matter; only Lincoln matters. We all know what would have happened if Lee had defeated Grant, Lincoln would have appointed Sherman to battle Lee. And if Lee had defeated Sherman, then Sheridan would have been appointed. If Sheridan had been defeated, then George H. Thomas, and if not Thomas then Winfield Scott Hancock, and if not Hancock then Joshua Chamberlain.  Sooner or later, Lincoln would have found the man to defeat Lee, and it is the genius of Lincoln, that the North would have stayed the course with him.

The North’s casualty lists would have broken any rational man, any other man but Lincoln. The defeat of the South is because of one man, Abraham Lincoln.

The South fought for slavery; slavery is perfidy. Slavery is equal to the Nazi Holocaust. The Germans don’t have Nazi History month; they want to forget about the Nazis. But the South wants to remember the Confederacy, why?

Is it just pure racism? No.

The Confederate History Month is not about the Confederacy per se. The Administration of the Confederacy was a bunch of losers……all this, this hunger for the Lost Cause, the Bonnie Blue Flag, the Stars and Bars is all about one man, Robert E. Lee.

Lee whitewashes the South.

He is arguably the finest general ever bred on American soil, Winifield Scott, who knew a lot about soldiering, thought so, and so do I.

It is above  argument that  he is the finest man, the”best” man ever to be in American public service. Beloved by the public, beloved by his soldiers, beloved by his family, honored for his integrity, offered the command of the Union Army by Lincoln. He is Edward the Confessor with a sword and a family.

Those Southern boys who crossed a mile wide field into the waiting guns of the Army of the Potomac did not do it for the Confederacy, nor Jeff Davis. They did it for “Massa Robert.” He was an extraordinary man, a towering moral figure; and the son of a bitch fought for slavery. It is amazing. By doing so, by being the best of men fighting for the worst institution, he truly cursed the nation.

Oliver Wendell Holmes Junior thought that it was in the best interest of the nation that Lee be hung after the war, for Holmes rightly noted, that the worst thing on earth was the good man who fought for the evil cause.

Because of his genius, and goodness, Lee fighting for slavery hurt this nation more than any other man. I too think he should have been hung.

This emotional hunger for the Confederacy is an emotional hunger for a time in which this nation had Lincoln and Lee, together, at the same time,breathing the same air.

This yearning for the old days,is because the present is so bereft of leadership, on every level, in every institution. So let them have their Confederate History Month; let them remember Lee as the Giant that he was. For if they do that, they will have to come to grips, with the fact a greater Giant brought Lee down, and that Greater Giant was Abraham Lincoln.

Remembering the Confederacy extols Lincoln.

Tomorrow, I will blog on the COSMIC significance of the American Civil War.

SIDEBAR

The full version of the BONNIE BLUE FLAG

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2F-drjUwNU

A blog about the caliber of Abraham Lncoln

http://gerrymaxeyworkshop.com/blogging/?p=3454

The impact of the Civil War on American politics

http://gerrymaxeyworkshop.com/blogging/?p=2542

SIDEBAR II

Remarkably, the best performance I have ever seen of General Lee, and my opinion is adhered to by the Southern boys I know, was the one given by the Liberal icon Martin Sheen in the film GETTYSBURG.

I hope the actor who does my General Lee does just as good a job.

SIDEBAR III

The most Homeric retelling of the Civil War is Shelby Foote’s trilogy, THE CIVIL WAR; the savviest interpretation of facts is James McPherson’s BATTLE CRY OF FREEDOM.