The Sons of Confederate Veterans holds an annual summer camp that it bills as a place for young people to learn the truth about Southern history. That, according to the group, includes abandoning the liberal, politically correct view of history through thoughtful instruction on our Southern history and culture.
Our kids arent getting taught this stuff in the schools, said Phil Walters, who helps organize the groups Sam Davis Youth Camp. Great American heroes like Jefferson Davis and General Robert Lee our kids are not gonna be told that these people are evil, hate-mongering slave-holders and not have us do something to correct it.
Hundreds of teenagers from across the South attend Confederate camps in several states, including Texas and South Carolina, where 21-year-old, Confederate-sympathizing Dylann Roof allegedly murdered nine African-Americans in a historic Black church last week after spending an hour with his victims studying the bible. Former SCV Commander Johnnie Holley, who has volunteered at Sam Davis camps, says the youth camp is used as a recruitment tool for the organization.
Probably one of the largest problem[s] that all of these heritage organizations .[have] is the age of the membership, he says. In the schools today, the war is not taught properly, our children are dying for information about their ancestry and their heritage. If we dont bring our young people into our organizations, then the organizations will eventually die.
On the surface, the Sam Davis Youth Camp seems like a normal summer camptheres archery, swimming, boating and fishing. But in between the outdoor activitiesand daily cannon salutes to fallen Confederate soldierscampers attend classes on the true history of the Civil War (SCV members refer to the Civil War as the War of Southern Independence). According to the SCV, the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, and President Abraham Lincoln was one of the most racist leaders of his era. Walters says his group is not against African-Americans, and any links between the Confederacy and racism are a product of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples declaration of war on everything Confederate.
When you get down to it, this is a small group of peoplethe NAACPwho say that everything in the South is evil and that it needs to be erased, he says.
The Confederate camps have been around since the mid-2000s. They typically get about a hundred campers a year, between the ages of 12 and 18. Sessions are a week long, and cost $500. Every year, the SCV gauges interest around the South and then rents out a campground or other outdoor space in any states where there are enough campers. This year, there are camps in Virginia and Texas.
The SCVs history with hate groups is complex. The group initially was founded after the Civil War for descendents of Confederate soldiers killed during the war. It was organized to encourage the preservation of history, perpetuate the hallowed memories of brave men. The group has not been labeled a hate group, but one of its highest-profile membersand a man who is also one of the chief organizers of the Sam Davis Youth Camphas been on the Southern Poverty Law Centers hate-radar for nearly 20 years.
Kirk Lyons serves on the SCV Long-Range Planning Committee, which oversees the Sam Davis Youth Camp. Hes also one of the camps biggest boosters. When hes not raising money for Confederacy camp, Lyons is the top trial attorney for the Southern Legal Resource Center, a law firm he co-founded. He has defended members of the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groupsalthough, he says, he hasnt defended those types of cases in several years. He admits, however, that hes said some extreme things in the past that have caused organizations like the SPLC to wrongfully label him a hate-monger.
They dont tell you that my best friend of 17 years is H.K. Edgerton, he says. Edgerton is an African-American SCV member and former NAACP chapter president, and serves on the board of Lyons Southern Legal Resource Center. How many white supremacists do you know who have a black best friend.
According to the SPLC, Lyons is a former member of the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization founded by William Pierce, the author of the Turner Diaries, a fictional blueprint for starting a race war and something of a bible for hate groups since it was published in 1978. Pages of Pierces novel were found in the getaway car driven by Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in 1995. Lyons denies that he was ever a member of the Alliance, though Pierce has referenced him as such.
Lyons own words tend to echo the revolutionary themes in Pierces novel. In a speech in 2000 to American Friends of the British National Party, Lyons explained the sort of movement he was hoping to lead. The civil rights movement I am trying to form seeks a revolution, he said in the speech. We seek nothing more than a return to a godly, stable, tradition-based society with no Northernisms attached, a hierarchical society, a majority European-derived country.
In 2003, an SCV internal email was uncovered in which Lyons argues that members of the KKK should be allowed into the organization. According to the SPLC, the discovery of the email set off a struggle over the SCV [over whether to allow the organization to radicalize] that continues to this day, [and] that has led to the loss of thousands of members, and badly damaged the groups reputation.
Lyons denies he has any ties to hate groups and says his law firm has represented dozens of African-American clients. Several years ago, he says, police in his hometown of Asheville, North Carolina, asked him to intervene when members of the Ku Klux Klan planned to stage a rally in town. I didnt even know who to call, he claims.
The camps director, Jack Marlar, says he was familiar with Lyons reputation as a racist when he first met him 15 years ago but thats not who he is.
The SPLC maintains that Lyons organizations promote hate and that he still has ties to known extremist groups.
Despite Lyons murky history, Walters says the camp is open to all races and religions. According to Lyons, this years group of campers includes two African-Americans, three Hispanic children and several with Native American or Asian ancestry. That said, not a single African-American is seen in any photos or videos of the camp posted online.
They dont tell you that my best friend of 17 years is H.K. Edgerton, he says. Edgerton is an African-American SCV member and former NAACP chapter president, and serves on the board of Lyons Southern Legal Resource Center. How many white supremacists do you know who have a black best friend.
I was a child in whitest Mississippi, reading for my life, when I discovered that everything I had been told about Abraham Lincoln was a lie. Astounded, unable to believe White media or White textbooks, I embarked on a private study designed not to satisfy course requirements but to save my life.
Was I, to paraphrase Sartre, saved? No, lost.
For I discovered that I lived in an Orwellian world where scholars with all the degrees the schools give could say in all seriousness that a separatist was an integrationist and that a White supremacist was the ultimate symbol of race relations and the American Dream. The proof was the Lincoln Memorial and the fact that dreamers of all races had this strange urge to go there and tell their deepest dreams of an integrated millennium to the cold, white, marble statue of a historical figure whose deepest dream was a land without Native Americans, African-Americans, and Martin Luther Kings.
Thirty or so years after my first encounter with the Abraham Lincoln everybody tries to hide, I suggested that Ebony magazine do a story with the title, "Was Abe Lincoln A White Supremacist?" My colleagues said the title wouldn't work because everybody knew that Lincoln was the great emancipator. I said, in response, that I could prove that Lincoln was a White supremacist and that the Emancipation Proclamation freed few if any slaves.
They laughed when I sat down at the typewriter.
But Publisher John H. Johnson said that if I could prove it, he would print it. I had already written a Lincoln book in my mind, never thinking that anybody would print it, and it only required a few weeks to produce a book-sized draft that was reduced to magazine size and published in the February 1968 Ebony.
To my surprise, the story triggered a national controversy. The New York Times and other newspapers published condemnatory editorials, and varied columnists suggested that the Republic was in danger. To meet this threat, assorted historians and freelance writers were rushed to the front lines to write articles proving that I was a Black Power Militant and that Abraham Lincoln always loved colored people in his own way. In an incredible article in the New York Times, called "Was Lincoln A Honky?" Herbert Mitgang said it was racist to say that Lincoln was a racist because he opposed Black citizenship and equal rights andLincoln's words"the niggers and white people ... marrying together."
This was a smokescreen, for anybody who knew anything about Lincoln knew I was right; and after the shouting died down, there was a quiet reevaluation and a general abandonment of the cruder aspects of the great emancipator myth.
This, however, was not the end of it. For although few newspapers print Great White Emancipator editorials on February 12, and although fewer scholars hold Lincoln up as a model of race relations, there is still a tendency to exaggerate his role in the abortive emancipation of African-Americans and to evade the true meaning and imperatives of the First Reconstruction, imperatives that are remarkably similar to the true meaning and imperatives of the Second Reconstruction of the 1980s and 1990s.
At the same time, almost without popular notice, an increasing number of scholars, hooked beyond redemption on the warm and comforting myths of The Immaculate Emancipation and The Great War Between The Northern and Southern [White] Brothers, are circling the wagons around a new and improved version of the old myth, suggesting that Lincoln was converted at the last moment before his tragic assassination or that he said all those terrible things about separation and Black deportation because he wanted to get elected to office, like any other red-blooded American. Worse, far worse, is the fact that few historiansJohn Hope Franklin, Vincent Harding, Robert Harris and others excepteddeal with Lincoln and the Civil War historically, that is to say, as an unfolding process and an open wound that is still festering and poisoning the body politic.
To paraphrase Dwight Macdonald, then, American literature is divided into three parts: fiction, nonfiction, and biographies of Abraham Lincoln.
[snip]
Lerone Bennett, Jr., "Forced Into Glory: Abraham Lincoln's White Dream," Johnson Publishing Company, Chicago, 2000, Preface