Back to the main articles page     

Facebook / Videos Posted by Sons of Confederate Veterans / An Open Report



On Friday, August 25, 2010, I would don the uniform of the Southern soldier and make my way into Elizabethon, Tennessee where I would speak that evening at Sycamore Shoals State Park. By the time I was to speak, the auditorium was full to capacity, and of course there was Donnell, a young black man who along with two of his white friends had come to hear what I had to say.

I would go with my rhetoric from Lincoln and his support for the Corwin Amendment to the Morill Tariffs. And on from the Historic March Across Dixie to the March into Maryville, Tennessee in support of my babies who had made a stand for Southern Heritage and those glorious men and women who had fought and died under the Southern Cross.

However, when I spoke of the Honorable Nathan Bedford Forrest, a man who had been in the slave trade, and God bless the day that he was; because he was the man who never refused the knock at his door from some distraught African who had come to plea to him to buy back a member of his family who had been sold and taken away. Saddle up my horse was his usual reply, as he
rode off to make a purchase he didn’t even need.

I would go on about how the Black folks in Tennessee had recounted that General Forrest was the first Civil Rights Leader for the African people. And while he headed the Klan, he did not form it, and that many a night, his Klan had saved Black and White folks from the terror of the Union League.

Before I could relate the following story: In an email several days before, I had asked my Face Book friends to send me a donation of one dollar to aid me in my journey to help those who called on me daily. An eight year old boy would be the only one who responded by sending me an old silver dollar passed down to him from his grandpa. That dollar was valued at over $125.00. I would send the dollar back to the young man.

The irony was that I had met this baby boy’s dad and some of his friends in a Tennessee graveyard at a Confederate Memorial Dedication as he and his friends stood gazing at a truck that had painted on it picture of General Forrest and his men in the background. The young black men would stop the late Jim Maddox and myself and one would inquire about the whereabouts of
the Black soldiers that I had earlier spoke of who had rode with Forrest. He would tell us that the picture was politically incorrect. Commander Maddox would give the young Black man his assurance that he would do something about. The young man in turn would tell us that he would do something about telling the truth about the role that he had learned about the place of
honor that Black folks had earned under the Confederate Flag. The young man who sent the silver dollar was his son.

Donnell would walk out, throw up his hands before I could tell him this story. God bless him. The video posted below by the Sons of Confederate Veterans is the cemetery where I met this baby boy’s dad.