Harold A Black
We just spent the week camping near Asheville at Lake Powhattan Recreation area. It is a beautiful campground with plenty of space between campers. Asheville was in the process of removing the memorial to Zebulon Vance who commanded a regiment of North Carolina Volunteers in the early days of the Civil War. Vance then was elected governor in 1862 and proceeded to be a thorn in the side of Jefferson Davis. During Lee’s campaign against Grant, Vance refused to send his militia to Lee’s aid. North Carolina’s ten thousand may have made a difference with Lee running short of men in his bedraggled army. But the confederacy was one of state’s rights and Davis had no authority to order Vance to support Lee. Vance said that he needed his troops to protect the home front from Sherman who was advancing through South Carolina and threatening North Carolina.
Vance was an enigma, both pro Union and pro slavery. He once said “the general welfare and prosperity of our country, the very foundation of our society, of our fortunes, and, to a greater or lesser extent, the personal safety of our people, combine to make us defend [slavery] to the last extremity.” Although he opposed succession, when succession came like most of his fellow southerners he chose to cast his lot with his state and fight for the south.
In downtown Asheville stands a memorial to Vance. It is a 75 foot tall monument dedicated in 1897. As part of the cancel culture Asheville decided to remove the monument. That was blocked by a lawsuit filed by the Society for the Historical Preservation of the 26th North Carolina Troops – Vance’s regiment. The North Carolina Supreme Court denied the suit ruling in the city’s favor and demolition began on May 14.
I, for one, am glad that the memorial and others like it throughout the south are being removed from town squares. Such memorials were elected during a time that I call the southern reign of terror, where blacks had no power, were subjected to Jim Crow laws, had to “stay in their place”, feared lynchings, denied the vote, had no elected officials and no voice in public proceedings. I looked upon all these memorials as a finger to us blacks and hated them all. When I was in school in the 1950s-1960s in Georgia, the state did not celebrate Memorial Day. Rather it observed Confederate Memorial Day. My schools refused to commemorate dead confederates and did not fly the racist Georgia state flag which had the rebel banner added to it after the Brown decision in 1954.
I was glad when schools throughout the south took confederates names off their schools. I would not have wanted to have Robert E. Lee’s name on my diploma despite the fact that I admire Lee greatly. I was sad to see that one school district in Virginia decided to reinstate the names of Stonewall Jackson and cavalry officer Turner Ashby to two of its schools. Again, most black parents have little choice as to where to send their children to school. Although some protested the move and favored a more generic name for the schools, the school board reverted to the confederate names. Again, I would not want the name of Stonewall Jackson on my diploma despite the fact that he was a great general. The county is rural with a small population of only 3.2 percent black. It is not surprising that these residents do not have much of a voice and much of an impact on the county’s politics. I would hate to be black in that county. For us blacks, the names and memorials symbolize racism in America, despite the protestations of those embracing the “Lost Cause”. I tell those who glorify the confederate generals that Rommel – the Desert Fox – was a great general but there are no memorials to him in Germany. Why? How was Rommel’s role any different from Lee’s? Again recall that my maternal great great grandfather was a sergeant in the 6th Georgia who never disowned his black son born to a cook on the Jarrell Plantation in Jones County, Georgia. My son and nephew have paid a visit to his grave to tell him how his offspring are faring. But we are glad he lost and I would not want a Jones County school named in his honor.
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