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.
[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.
Slaves were owned by whites, blacks and indians. They were owned North and South.
Under the British and in the early American Republic, yes, but pretty rapidly the practice ended in the northern states and was pushed down into the South, where they would not give up the practice.
Sure, there were some black and Indian slaveholders. 384,800 white slaveholders, and 214 black or part-black ones. The blacks didn't impose it, and they didn't secede to maintain it.
Northern whites were bigots? Of course lots were, and are. The worst race riot in American history was in Detroit, not the South. Watts and South Central are in LA, not the South.
That's really beside the point. The South was agitated to secede, and did secede, to preserve and extend the institution of black slavery. And that was evil. Obviously.
Nothing more really needs to be said about it. They did it. It was bad, They lost. And slavery is done. Good riddance.
I'm not sure what you're trying to defend by your argument. That there existed a few dozen, a few hundred, of blacks and half-whites in an ocean of otherwise white American Southern slaveholders? Of course. So what? There were Jews who cooperated in the Holocaust too.
That doesn't change anything. Slavery was bad. Dixie fought to preserve it. And lost, with great loss of life and destruction. And that's really too bad. But it is what it is. You can't take the taint of slavery off of Dixie by pointing out that Northern whites were, and are still, many of them, racists. Lots of Americans were anti-Semitic in World War II also - doesn't mean they were culpable for the Holocaust. When the war came, they fought on the right side.
So, what is it that you want us to see, exactly? That there were some (not many, but some) black slaveholders buried in the mass of Southern slaveholders? Sure. ok. So what? That doesn't make the institution of slavery any less reprehensible. It doesn't mean that the blacks, writ large, were responsible for their own enslavement. It doesn't mean that the South was right. It means simply what we all know: Individual men will take their opportunities where they find them.
As far as taking the magesterial tone about manumission, you're engaging in deception. Go through the laws of the Southern states in the decade before the war. Almost all of them prohibited it. Get up to the Border states, where there were not many slaves to begin with, and you might find more laxity.
I really don't know why anybody would put such energy and passion into what you're doing here. You're not "setting the record straight". Your comments about manumission seek to obscure it. Why? Your "them too" comment about blacks holding slaves, and your resolute refusal to acknowledge that the great bulk of the few who did did so for benevoient reasons - to protect friends and family FROM chattel slavery using the only institution that could do that, in a world where manumission was, in fact, mostly illegal.
You're not "setting the record strate", you're obfuscating in order to protect something, something that is long dead and does not need protecting. Why do this?
You have a good legal mind. But you don't flatter yourself trying to defend the indefensible. It reminds me of those contrarian kids back in history class who tried to defend the German side in the World Wars, except that you're not a kid, so unfortunately it starts to resemble those mature adults who try to defend the German side in World War II. Why do that?
You're defending the indefensible. Slavery was really bad. dependence on it hurt the development of the South, fighting to preserve full rights to do it resulted in the devastation of the South, and the bitter racial legacy of slavery and segregation still haunt us. It's why Barack Obama was elected President.
What, then are you hoping to accomplish by putting your legal mind to this subject in this way? You're not standing up for the truth - you're obscuring the truth by pretending that a barely existent side practice was a norm, you're denying the anti-manumission laws that governed most of Dixie. You're smart enough to know better too, but you're still pressing ahead.
It's almost as if you don't want to admit our Southern sin - that's what slavery and segregation were: the great sin of the South. That it happened in the North doesn't matter. The Northerners stopped it, but we didn't (I speak here as the heir of Virginia plantation owners and CSA cavalry officers). Their sins of racism they're accountable for, but that does not excuse our willingness to fight to the death to preserve the "State's Rights"...to preserve and extend slavery. And then to refuse to accept the result and fight for the next century to keep the blacks down.
We all have our sins. Northerners, Southerners, English, French, Protestants and Catholics. We're all sinners. It doesn't do us or our ancestors any good to pretend they didn't, or to try to obfuscate or obscure the magnitude of it. The South seceded over slavery. We shouldn't have. We fought very bravely and, in Virginia anyway, intelligently. We gave the Union forces hell. But we lost. And in the bigger picture of things, that was for the best. We lost, slavery ended - by force because it could not be ended by peaceful politics. And we are all, Northern and Southern, Black and White, better for that. Poor and Middle class Southern Whites are better for it: who can compete with free labor?
This is the very problem of illegal immigration today? And the same sort of folks that stood so strongly for slavery, stand strongly for open borders for cheap labor, for the same reasons: personal profit.
I don't say you're standing for slavery. You're not. But you're trying to give moral cover to it. "Blacks did it too!" So what? Blacks and whites are people. And blacks pay taxes for the social welfare necessary today to continue to try to pull up the impoverishment that remains the overhang of harsh segregation - legal and economic - in our lifetimes, or at least in mine.
My advice: rethink what you are doing. Don't out your legal mind to the task of morally exonerating the slaveholders or the Old South, or the Germans in their distempers. It's a fools errand that will diminish you, because it will force you to obfuscate the decisive truths that render the position you're trying to cover for morally indefensible. In other words: the game ain't worth the candle. Out that mind to use defending something else. Old Dixie is dead. She doesn't need protection anymore.
