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An Open Letter/How do we disassociate the flag from supremacy

From: hk@csaweb.org
To: beeton@hotmail.com

Dear Lieut. Carney,

On last evening past as I began packing in final preparation for my upcoming
March into Washington, D.C.; I would be asked virtually the same question
by a group of young girls along with my niece that you posed to me in an email
message. How do we disassociate the flag from supremacy groups? I don’t honestly
believe that you can. Only the truth can set one free. This nation on purpose
taught an untruth to its people, and then set them against each other. It
is unfortunate that so many honorable people are perceived as evil because
we don’t have facts to process into our thinking process.

The girls who sat before me wanted to know how I could carry the Confederate
Flag when the Klan had just expressed their hate for Black people, and why
did they hate us ? The only answer that I could give them without going into
a litany of reasons was that the public school system had taught them to.
Had any of the Klan read the infamous letter written to the Yankee General
Howard of the Freedman’s Bureau by the Honorable Reverend R.L. Dabney from
Prince Edward County, Va. in June of 1865; they would have never ever fallen
susceptible to the chicanery of the North to divide and separate, or hold
responsible that unwilling, and unknowing African who was caught in the middle.
I could not justify taking the flag away from the Klan, when so many of their
very own relatives like far too many who look like me had fought under this
glorious Southern Flag. However, I can surely tell them that men like the
Honorable General Marse Robert E. Lee, General Nathan Bedford Forest, General
Patrick Cleyburn, General Wade Hampton, General Stephen D. Lee, or President
Jefferson Davis would cotton to anyone terrorizing the very Honorable people
who had stood by them in a time when their very own brothers, and in many
cases fathers invaded their homes, killed, raped, robbed, stole, and virtually
ravished their homeland with no sense of decency to follow the norms of civilize
war fare that even primitive warriors would adhere to when confronting innocent
men women, and children. I would tell the Klan that these men like Rev. R.L.
Dabney from Prince Edward County, Virginia, knew that the African was an unsuspecting
pawn at the mercy of a man who would use him as a tool to drive a wedge into
the heart of the Southern White man. However, I would tell the Southern Klan
that not all these men were the Jesse Jackson of their time; far too many,
if not most, would roll up their sleeves alongside that man they still called
master, and do as they had done when together they drugged the entire supposedly
civilize world from the caves of human darkness with a product called cotton
; with everything stacked against them : the Abomination Acts, Uncle Tom’s
Cabin, Sherman’s Field Order to steal from the White Man–Forty Acres and
a Mule, Union League, the 14th Amendment, the 10th Amendment, Carpetbaggers,
burned fields, stolen or murdered farm animals, and their very own Jim Crowe.

I would tell the Klan that far too many of those people who look like me,
rather than choose colonization back to Africa, chose to stay beside that
man that he not only called master, but also family as he had done when he
made the implements of war, provided the food stuff to a beleaguered army,
stayed honorably with his family while all the men were away fighting his
brothers and their soldiers of fortune, and even fought by his side in honor.
I would tell the Klan and any other Supremacist; down here in those cotton,
corn, and sugar fields, between that man called slave and the other called
master; the love of Jesus Christ that General Stone Wall Jackson spoke to
those little Black babies in Sunday School, was found and practiced right
here in the Southland of America, in lieu of the economic institution of slavery,
and perhaps if we had been left alone, and not fell victim to mans old age
habit of greed; then we would be shining examples of a Constitution whose
meaning of Democracy with all men created equal would be fact. God bless the
Ku Klux Klan for they too are victims of man’s inhumanity to man like all
the rest of us. It is all so sad.

I shall ask the President all along the way ; to please have the courage within
his powers to restore the honor to an honorable people, end a terrible historical
lie , and return the thievery taken unjustly from an honorable patriotic section
of this country, and allow us to honor our ancestors and symbols in peace.

Terry Lee and I leave on Monday evening October 9, 2006 in route to Madison
Heights, Virginia, where we will give a series of lectures, and step off into
history once more on our trek to Washington, D.C., on the morning of October
14, 2006.

HK Edgerton