Stephen Caudill – 4/13/2010 Friend Request
Hi Mr. Edgerton,
I’m a descendant of a Confederate soldier. And I had two other great-great-grandfathers who owned slaves in Mason County, KY but they sat out the war as Kentucky was supposedly ‘neutral’. But at any rate, after the Civil War, the slave-owning ancestors freed their slaves and gave them land adjacent to their own. So they went from former slave-owners to neighbors of blacks, and my grandma who died at age 91 even remembered growing up with the descendents of the freed slaves, etc… As for myself, I grew up with two black families as neighbors and my current neighbors now are black, and their son is my son’s best buddy as they’re both 6 and go to the same school. Nevertheless, I personally think you are very courageous and also helpful in dispelling the current northen dogma that everything was great for black people in the north before and after the Civil War while the southerners were evil racists etc… In my own 46 years of observations, I think really the people of the north have proven to be truly racist, while most – but of course not all – Southerners routinely welcome blacks into their homes where neighborhoods are integrated. By the way, my best friend ever was a black man from the Congo, who managed to win a scholarship to Univ. of Florida and got a PhD in Chemistry, he is like a brother and mentor to me. I don’t want to get too political, but Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, etc…seem to thrive on racism, in the sense that the more they claim racism is rampant, the more money they get, and as for my opinion there, none of them really make any noise about the millions of blacks in Africa held as slaves even today! But sure enough, if someone in America – like Virginia’s governor – makes a politically incorrect mistake, they’re all over that, while they ignore the plight of modern slaves in Africa. Deo Vindica and God bless you for your courage and integrity. Steve Caudill, Camp 1629 SCV.
