ARAB, Ala. – The fight over Confederate symbolism has landed in an Alabama town where education leaders have banned the high school marching band from playing “Dixie” as the fight song.
Dozens of opponents of the decision packed a city school board meeting Thursday night in support of the tune, which they depict as a traditional part of the soundtrack of life in their small, Southern town rather than an ode to the days of slavery in the Old South.
“We’re from Alabama, we’re not from New York,” said Daniel Haynes, 36, who attended Arab (AY-rab) High School and loves hearing the tune played after the Knights score a touchdown.
Board members didn’t budge. The 750-student school has a new principal, band director, football coach and stadium this year, said Superintendent John Mullins, and the change was needed in a system where the core values include mutual respect and unity.
“I really think it’s the right decision for the right reason at the right time,” Mullins said in an interview.
Supporters of the song say they’ll now take their complaints to the City Council, which appoints the five-member school board, but it’s unclear what might happen next. An old R&B song, “The Horse,” has temporarily replaced “Dixie” in the band’s repertoire until a new fight song is selected.
Passions are running high among some in Arab, where many are still upset by school leaders’ decision a few years ago to comply with a Supreme Court decision and end student-led Christian prayers over the public address system before football games. Complaints about “Dixie” have renewed the debate over the role of religion in pregame ceremonies.
“I like ‘Dixie,’ but I’m here for prayer,” said Shane Alldredge, who attended the board meeting wearing a T-shirt that said “Put Dixie and prayer back in the game.”
Community college history teacher Russ Williams told the board he loves “Dixie” and other elements of Southern history, but the song “isn’t worth the controversy” if it causes others pain.
The “Dixie” debate isn’t brewing just in Arab, an overwhelmingly white town of about 8,200 people that’s 70 miles (112 kilometers) north of Birmingham. Fans of the tune also are complaining in Glade Spring, Virginia, after leaders there prohibited the band from playing “Dixie” during games this fall at Patrick Henry High School.
Written by Ohio native Daniel D. Emmett, “Dixie’s Land” was first performed on stage in New York in 1859, two years before the Civil War, said historian and musician Bobby Horton, who performed some of the music for Ken Burns’ epic miniseries “The Civil War.”
“It was written as what they called a walk-around tune … for a minstrel show. It was like a tune between acts,” said Horton.
Later known simply as “Dixie,” the song became an unofficial anthem of the rebel states after it was played at the inauguration of Confederate President Jefferson Davis in 1861. President Abraham Lincoln loved the tune and asked for it to be played at the White House the night Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered, said Horton.
University and high school bands across the South played “Dixie” for generations, but the practice waned as complaints rose about the song being a painful, racially insensitive reminder of the oppression of slavery.
The University of Mississippi’s “Pride of the South” marching band excluded the song from its playlist in 2016, and the Marching Rebels band of Robert E. Lee High School in Midland, Texas, quit playing “Dixie” last year.
Southern historian Wayne Flynt, who remembers the song being sung in segregated schools in Alabama in the 1940s when he was a boy, said some view it as an anthem of regional pride. But “Dixie” and other Confederate emblems became symbols of white defiance as legalized segregation came under attack during the civil rights era, he said.
“I would argue that Dixie is not necessarily an inherently racist song. It can certainly be a racist song. The way in which it’s been used … tends to accelerate the understanding of it nationally as a racist song,” Flynt said.
This summer in Arab, Mullins released a statement saying the song was being dropped because it has “negative connotations that contradict our school district’s core values of unity, integrity, and relationships.”
The song hadn’t previously been an issue in Arab, which Census statistics show is more than 96 percent white. But through the years, the band didn’t play the song when visiting more diverse schools, officials said.
School board members have publicly supported Mullins’ decision to give up “Dixie.”
The board president, former Arab football coach Wayne Trimble, said his views were shaped by an incident from the late 1970s when an opposing head coach said he wasn’t sure he could convince players on his team to make the trip to Arab because of “Dixie.”
“That has stuck with me a long time,” Trimble said in an interview. “Is that the way we want Arab to be perceived?”
Poster Comment:
An old R&B song, “The Horse,” has temporarily replaced “Dixie” in the band’s repertoire until a new fight song is selected.
The only thing to remember is that to those that remove history(then forget) are doomed to repeat it! Who were the south slavemasters(Just like todays illegal aliens pushers)? Demoncrap! Why do blacks support Demoncrap? That's the 64K dollar questions!! Smart blacks do not support Demoncrap because they can think for themselves.
The only thing to remember is that to those that remove history (then forget) are doomed to repeat it! Who were the south slavemasters (Just like todays illegal aliens pushers)?
The southern slave owners were wealthy land owners who could afford to own slaves. Slave ownership belonged to only about 6% of the slave state population.
Wealthy Blacks were slave owners, documented back to 1654 and on through the Civil War.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates may be best known for the "Beer Summit" with President Obama. He is a graduate of Yale Unitversity and serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Wikipedia link.
One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.
[...]
In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.
And for a time, free black people could even "own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote.
One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.
n the 1839 Census, but there were 214 free blacks (out of 320,000 in the country) who owned slaves. Most of the cases in which free blacks owned black slaves were cases of benevolent ownership, whereby free blacks bought friends or family to protect them. After the 1840s, the manumission of slaves was prohibited, so the free black slaveowners who bought friends and relatives could not formally free them. Obviously this was not exploitative or economic slavery.
In French-speaking Louisiana there was a significant cultural difference from the rest of the South owing to both French culture and Catholicism. There, there was a lot more mixing of white slaveowners with black female slaves, sometimes leading to Catholic marriages. Marriage or not, often the mixed-race children were recognized by their fathers, which made them free, and eligible to own slaves. So in French Louisiana there truly was the sort of economic exploitative slavery of some mixed-race slave owners and black slaves, not the benevolent sort of black ownership described above.
So yes, among the approximately 385,000 slaveowners in the USA before the war, 214 of them were black, and among them, a handful of mixed-race French Catholics in Louisiana did indeed practice economic slavery. The rest of the black ownership of slaves elsewhere was of the benevolent protective type.
One half of one one thousandth of Southern slaveowners were blacks owning blacks, almost all of them technical owners of friends and family members to protect them from real slavery. A handful were real slaveowners in the exploitative sense.
Speaking of what happened in the British Colonial period is not relevant if one is speaking of the moral culpability of the United States, any more than one can speak of how relatively well the French treated in the Indians in the French Canadian Michigan territory that eventually became part of the United States. Different regime, different responsibility.
As a nation, America is responsible for what happened after 1776 in the lands that it controlled.
That some free blacks in the South (who constituted only 8% of the black population), used the form of slavery to try to protect their friends and relatives from slavery was a clever use of the law, not a moral fault. The only place where exploitative slave ownership of blacks by mixed-race black-white folks was Louisiana, and the numbers there were a few handfuls.
Not sure what that demonstrates, really. Slavery was bad. Some blacks used the slave law to help others evade real slavery by subterfuge. A few mixed-race people in one state in particular engaged in standard economically exploitative slavery.
If the point is to affix blame for slavery on the blacks, well, it's pretty thin beer, really pathetic, truth be told. Slavery was a white domination thing, not a black thing.
After the 1840s, the manumission of slaves was prohibited, so the free black slaveowners who bought friends and relatives could not formally free them.
This claim is without merit.
Dred Scott was emancipated (manumitted) in 1857. Slaves could and were emancipated/manumitted after the 1840s.
26 Saint Louis Circuit Court Record 263
Tuesday May 26th 1857
Taylor Blow, who is personally known to the court, comes into open court, and acknowledges the execution by him of a Deed of Emancipation to his slaves, Dred Scott, aged about forty eight years, of full negro blood and color, and Harriet Scott wife of said Dred, aged thirty nine years, also of full negro blood & color, and Eliza Scott a daughter of said Dred & Harriet, aged nineteen years of full negro color, and Lizzy Scott, also a daughter of said Dred & Harriet, aged ten years likewise of full negro blood & color.
This was shortly after Taylor Blow obtained ownership of his childhood companion Etheldred Scott by means of a quitclaim deed by then-owner Calvin Chaffee, an abolitionist congressman from Massachusetts.
New York Times, “Emancipation of Dred Scott and Family,” May 27, 1857
The following text is presented here in complete form, as it originally appeared in print. Spelling and other typographical errors have been preserved as in the original.
Emancipation of Dred Scott and Family.
ST. LOUIS, Tuesday May 26.
DRED SCOTT, with his wife and two daughters, were emancipated today by TAYLOR BLOW, Esq. They had all been conveyed to him by Mr. CHAFFE, of Massachusetts, for that purpose, as the law of this State on the subject requires, that the emancipation shall be performed by a citizen of Missouri. ...
Most of the cases in which free blacks owned black slaves were cases of benevolent ownership, whereby free blacks bought friends or family to protect them. ...
That some free blacks in the South (who constituted only 8% of the black population), used the form of slavery to try to protect their friends and relatives from slavery was a clever use of the law, not a moral fault. The only place where exploitative slave ownership of blacks by mixed-race black-white folks was Louisiana, and the numbers there were a few handfuls. ...
A few mixed-race people in one state in particular engaged in standard economically exploitative slavery.
These claims are unsupported and unsupportable.
There were a large (about 42%) percentage of Black slave owners who owned one slave for benevolent purposes. There were Black slave owners who owned a large quantity of slaves, and this was not for benevolent purposes.
Exploitative slave ownership by Blacks is documented as fact outside of Louisiana. or the deep South in measures beyond any mere handful.
As Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. wrote, quoting John Hope Franklin,
"The great African-American historian, John Hope Franklin, "states this clearly: "The majority of Negro owners of slaves had some personal interest in their property." But, he admits, "There were instances, however, in which free Negroes had a real economic interest in the institution of slavery and held slaves in order to improve their economic status."
Dr. Gates also noted, quoting Joel A. Rogers frojm his book, 100 Amazing Facts About the Negro, "The Negro slave-holders, like the white ones, fought to keep their chattels in the Civil War." Rogers also notes that some black men, including those in New Orleans at the outbreak of the War, "fought to perpetuate slavery."
Also noted by Dr. Gates,
Halliburton concludes, after examining the evidence, that "it would be a serious mistake to automatically assume that free blacks owned their spouse or children only for benevolent purposes." Woodson himself notes that a "small number of slaves, however, does not always signify benevolence on the part of the owner." And John Hope Franklin notes that in North Carolina, "Without doubt, there were those who possessed slaves for the purpose of advancing their [own] well-being … these Negro slaveholders were more interested in making their farms or carpenter-shops 'pay' than they were in treating their slaves humanely." For these black slaveholders, he concludes, "there was some effort to conform to the pattern established by the dominant slaveholding group within the State in the effort to elevate themselves to a position of respect and privilege." In other words, most black slave owners probably owned family members to protect them, but far too many turned to slavery to exploit the labor of other black people for profit.
The amount of investment value and the number of slaves involved practically dictates that there were a number of cases where Black slave ownership was pursued for economic status. A number of cases are cited with ownership of over 50 slaves, and some of over 100 slaves. To put this in perspective, again quoting Dr. Gates,
William Ellison's fascinating story is told by Michael Johnson and James L. Roark in their book, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South. At his death on the eve of the Civil War, Ellison was wealthier than nine out of 10 white people in South Carolina. He was born in 1790 as a slave on a plantation in the Fairfield District of the state, far up country from Charleston. In 1816, at the age of 26, he bought his own freedom, and soon bought his wife and their child. In 1822, he opened his own cotton gin, and soon became quite wealthy. By his death in 1860, he owned 900 acres of land and 63 slaves. Not one of his slaves was allowed to purchase his or her own freedom.
Also:
According to Johnson and Roark, the wealthiest black person in Charleston, S.C., in 1860 was Maria Weston, who owned 14 slaves and property valued at more than $40,000, at a time when the average white man earned about $100 a year. (The city's largest black slaveholders, though, were Justus Angel and Mistress L. Horry, both of whom owned 84 slaves.)
[underscore added.]
Also:
These men and women, from William Stanly to Madame Ciprien Ricard, were among the largest free Negro slaveholders, and their motivations were neither benevolent nor philanthropic. One would be hard-pressed to account for their ownership of such large numbers of slaves except as avaricious, rapacious, acquisitive and predatory. But lest we romanticize all of those small black slave owners who ostensibly purchased family members only for humanitarian reasons, even in these cases the evidence can be problematic. Halliburton, citing examples from an essay in the North American Review by Calvin Wilson in 1905, presents some hair-raising challenges to the idea that black people who owned their own family members always treated them well:
"A free black in Trimble County, Kentucky, " … sold his own son and daughter South, one for $1,000, the other for $1,200." … A Maryland father sold his slave children in order to purchase his wife. A Columbus, Georgia, black woman -- Dilsey Pope -- owned her husband. "He offended her in some way and she sold him … "
As Dr. Gates concluded, "given the long history of class divisions in the black community, which Martin R. Delany as early as the 1850s described as 'a nation within a nation,' and given the role of African elites in the long history of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, perhaps we should not be surprised that we can find examples throughout black history of just about every sort of human behavior, from the most noble to the most heinous, that we find in any other people's history." [underscore added]
[Justified #1] The only thing to remember is that to those that remove history (then forget) are doomed to repeat it! Who were the south slavemasters (Just like todays illegal aliens pushers)?
[Vicomte13 #10] If the point is to affix blame for slavery on the blacks, well, it's pretty thin beer, really pathetic, truth be told. Slavery was a white domination thing, not a black thing.
If the point were remotely to affix blame for slavery on blacks, you might have a point. It was clearly in response to the quote from #1 about removal of history and who were the south slavemasters. About 6% of white southerners owned slaves. About 94% did not, and the vast majority could not afford to own slaves.
Slaves were owned by whites, blacks and indians. They were owned North and South.
Speaking of what happened in the British Colonial period is not relevant if one is speaking of the moral culpability of the United States....
Of course it is relevant, and should include French and Dutch colonialism, and the Portuguese slave trade of the colonial era. With your focus on Louisiana, recall that slavery there was the result of French colonialism which persisted well after British colonialism in America. The slaves did not walk across the water to get here, and the United States government did not exist at the time millions were transported here. The problem was created and left behind by the colonial powers. That cannot be edited out of history as irrelevant.
The Act Prohibiting the Importation of Slaves (2 Stat. 426 of March 2, 1807) was effective in 1808, less than 20 years after the government under the U.S. Constitution was formed in 1889. That addressed the problem of the importation of more slaves, but they had no agreeable solution as to what to do with the millions of existing slaves. Blacks laws in the North resulted in the life expectancy of blacks in the North being less than that of the free blacks in the South.
Gradual emancipation in the North did not emancipate many. On paper, it emancipated slaves at a future date. The reality is that it created a very strong incentive to move or sell one's slave investment South. After the North had more or less succeeded in ethnically cleansing itself, it was ready to free the slaves that it had sold and no longer owned, but to keep them out their back yard with their harsh black laws.
Any Southern ideas of abolition involved exporting the freed slaves to the territories. Even as the Civil War approached, that conflicted with Lincoln's White Dream for the territories.
Sustain these men and negro equality will be abundant, as every white laborer will have occasion to regret when he is elbowed from his plow or his anvil by slave n------.
Lincoln, August 31, 1858, Carlinville, Illinois, CW 3:78 [Lincoln uses the plural N-word without elision]
Is it not rather our duty [as White men] to make labor more respectable by preventing all black competition, especially in the territories?
Lincoln, August 31, 1858, Carlinville, Illinois, CW 3:79
The nation never really addressed and solved the problem of what to do with the slaves if or when they were freed. The U.S. Army solved the problem of freeing them, but the newly freed slaves were pretty much left to their own devices to figure out what to do from there.
You decided to take up the cause of "blacks had slaves!" , a strange diversion.
Your imaginary nonsense is amusing.
Now you seem dug in on the idea that manumission was possible somewhere, so therefore it wasn't an issue.
You claimed that "After the 1840s, the manumission of slaves was prohibited, so the free black slaveowners who bought friends and relatives could not formally free them."
My post was not to you, and was in response to "The only thing to remember is that to those that remove history (then forget) are doomed to repeat it! Who were the south slavemasters," asked by Justified.
The words you quote back at #10 were stated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a graduate of Yale Unitversity and serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University:
One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.
You did not quote a mumbling word of mine.
As documented, the owners of slaves included Blacks. It also included Indians. It is a fact of history. Get over yourself and your religious and French snobbery.
Who were the slaveowners? It was more than a bunch of southern white sinners committing the Great Sin.
The only thing to remember is that to those that remove history (then forget) are doomed to repeat it! Who were the south slavemasters (Just like todays illegal aliens pushers)?
The southern slave owners were wealthy land owners who could afford to own slaves. Slave ownership belonged to only about 6% of the slave state population.
Wealthy Blacks were slave owners, documented back to 1654 and on through the Civil War.
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates may be best known for the "Beer Summit" with President Obama. He is a graduate of Yale Unitversity and serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Wikipedia link.
One of the most vexing questions in African-American history is whether free African Americans themselves owned slaves. The short answer to this question, as you might suspect, is yes, of course; some free black people in this country bought and sold other black people, and did so at least since 1654, continuing to do so right through the Civil War.
[...]
In a fascinating essay reviewing this controversy, R. Halliburton shows that free black people have owned slaves "in each of the thirteen original states and later in every state that countenanced slavery," at least since Anthony Johnson and his wife Mary went to court in Virginia in 1654 to obtain the services of their indentured servant, a black man, John Castor, for life.
And for a time, free black people could even "own" the services of white indentured servants in Virginia as well. Free blacks owned slaves in Boston by 1724 and in Connecticut by 1783; by 1790, 48 black people in Maryland owned 143 slaves. One particularly notorious black Maryland farmer named Nat Butler "regularly purchased and sold Negroes for the Southern trade," Halliburton wrote.
And you're doing so with the sort of aggression in your approach that makes enemies, that makes people remember it, makes them think "Ok, that guy is closeted racist".
The holier than thou crap you continually fall back on is just crap.
Take your closeted racist shit and stuff it.
And try not to make any more damn fool statements as at #10:
The only place where exploitative slave ownership of blacks by mixed-race black-white folks was Louisiana, and the numbers there were a few handfuls.
Dr. Gates gave plenty of examples that were not from Louisiana.
