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Press Conference – Orlando, Florida
At the request of Florida Commander Bob Adams of the Sons of
Confederate Veterans, on Friday August 18, Terry Lee and I attended
a press conference along side the Honorable Nelson Windbush and
a host of other compatriots of the Sons in Orlando, Florida. Commander
Adams would so eloquently lay out how the wonderful college scholarship
program would benefit; one ironically named in honor of Mr.. Windbush’s
very own grandfather who just happens to be one of those so often
forgotten Black Confederate Soldiers. He further pointed out how
as a community organization just how those revenues would further
enhance the many other community projects the Sons are actively
involved in. However, we knew that as long as the Southern Cross
would be the center of depiction on the plates ; the press wasn’t
going to let us off that easy. Mr.. Windbush built the coffin when
he spoke of the Honorable General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the
service of his grand pa and the other loyal Black men who rode alongside
the General. He continued own about the General’s relation with
the Black folk in Memphis, and further advanced the notion that
Forrest not only would head up the Klan, but would be highly regarded
as the first Civil Rights Leader for these very same Black folk.It was now my time to speak, yet I pondered; here we stand
at the base of a Confederate soldier who I had been told was now
referred to as the minute man by the city council when they spoke
of him, in a beautiful park donated to the city by a Confederate
General named Summerlin. My thoughts would go even further down
the road to Johnson C.Smith University, a traditionally Black College
in Charlotte, N.C., where another Confederate Officer had donated
his land, and even talked Yankee Soldiers into giving him the wood
from the torn down Confederate hospital to build the school. Here
I stood and the only thing I could think of was the kind of generosity
a man must have in his heart to give so much to his community and
the ultimate love and respect he must have for the man he called
slave who gave so much loyalty and love of himself that he would
now reciprocate. I could only speak of the honor and dignity earned,
but now displaced by those who followed the same Reconstruction
modus operandi that was used with the building of the Freeman’s
Bureau, and the establishment of the public school system in the
South; divide and separate White and Black folks in the South by
any means. Yes this license plate would create a great deal of dialogue,
the poverty pimp’s will surely come out with their distorted history
and mouths dripping talks of racism, bigotry, and offense; yet never
once taking one look in the mirror, or even evaluating the sum total
of their very own wrong as they line their pockets while feasting
at the tables of those who have taken the land, religion, and made
a mockery of the Constitution , and who come again to finish destroying
any vestige of the things we call Southern .
