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. ...
