The Governor of Mississippi Once Again Declares April Confederate Heritage Month
But there's a better way to remember this painful past.
I felt like I had to take a shower after writing this article. The level of continued racism coming from the highest elected officials in the land feels dirty. But I’ll get dirty to uncover the truth. Will you support me in this work by becoming a paid subscriber today?
“It’s about heritage not hate.”
That’s the refrain I heard repeated almost as a mantra when I lived in Mississippi.
If you’ve never been, brace yourself. You will hardly believe the outright celebration of the Confederacy that happens among parts of the population there.
One sign of this celebration is Confederate Heritage Month.
In a tradition dating back to 1993, the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, officially declared April as Confederate Heritage Month.
As reported by the Mississippi Free Press, he did not make a public announcement. We only learned of the statement through a Facebook post by the pro-Confederate, Lost Cause museum, Beauvoir, the home of Confederate president, Jefferson Davis.
Dated April 12, 2024, the declaration reads, in part:
“Whereas, as we honor all who lost their lives in this war, it is important for all Americans to reflect upon our nation’s past, to gain insight from our mistakes and successes, and to come to a full understanding that the lessons learned yesterday and today will carry us through tomorrow if we carefully and earnestly strive to understand and appreciate our heritage and our opportunities which lie before us.
“Now, therefore, I, Tate Reeves, Governor of the State of Mississippi, hereby proclaim the month of April 2024 as Confederate Heritage Month in the State of Mississippi.”
As a historian I have no problem encouraging remembrances of the past. But there’s a difference between remembering and celebrating. Between recollection and veneration. Between memorializing and valorizing.
Confederate Heritage Month lifts up the Confederacy and its heritage as a positive good that should not only be recalled but honored.
It calls on people to remember a Confederate heritage, but it is a heritage of hate.
The state of Mississippi seceded from the Union with these words:
Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery-- the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin.
The state with the highest proportion of Black people—a fact directly linked to the expansive practice of race-based chattel slavery in the region—proudly flaunts its racist past by dedicating an entire month to this heritage of enslavement.
But racism stunts the imagination.
How dull and very predictable to have a Confederate Heritage Month. What if we re-imagined a way to understand the past without cheering for people who fought to preserve slavery?
What if we had a Civil War Remembrance Month?1
It would be appropriate to set aside time in our civic calendar to remember and understand the nation’s bloodiest and most divisive war.
Untruths and myths about the Civil War, its causes, and consequences still abound.
A Civil War Remembrance Month could help us review events such as the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry in 1859, Lincoln’s stances on race and slavery, the history of Civil War battles, and more.
Most importantly, a Civil War Remembrance Month could be dedicated to remembering the plight, honor, and emancipation of enslaved Black people.
So often in the popular memory white people are at the center of the Civil War. What gets lost are the Black people nationwide whose fate hung in the balance.
Some sort of Civil War Remembrance Month would give us the opportunity to remember Black people, enslaved and free, who cooked meals, dug trenches, sewed uniforms, escaped plantations, fought, got injured, got sick, or died for the cause of freedom in the United States.
Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, said, “The North won the Civil War, but the South won the narrative war.”
Declaring April Confederate Heritage Month is an indication that he is right.
It’s time to write a new narrative about the Civil War and this country’s identity. A story that does not try to cling to a hateful past, but moves us toward a united future.
Are there ways your community or state continues to celebrate Confederate “heritage”? Do you have other ideas about how to remember the Civil War and this nation’s history of slavery? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
P.S. I have a chapter in my forthcoming book about the Civil War and how Black people fought for their own freedom. Pre-order the Spirit of Justice.
Or it could be a day or a week. Or it could go by another name altogether. Former Mississippi governor, Phil Bryant, once had a “Month of Unity” instead.
A Civil War Remembrance Month is such a good idea. I am presently rereading David Blight’s Race & Reunion: The Civil War In American Memory. He does an excellent job of discussing the process that led to and the nature of the reunion of the North and South after the Civil War. He writes extensively about the development of the Lost Cause Narrative and how that won out over the Emancipatory Narrative that Freedman and more Radical Republicans used to explain the meaning of the war. Reunion was accomplished at the cost of abandoning free and newly freed Black people to a South that surrendered (barely) militarily, but did not surrender in any other way. Memorializing the Confederate loss as an honorable defeat and clinging to a heritage that continued to inflict horrific terror and violent brutality on Black people long after Emancipation is to intentionally cloak the reality of grave injustice with an edifice of sentimentality. Sentimentality has the power to capture imaginations and stir up emotions, inculcating a loyalty to fabrications that are incredibly self-promoting, even self-idolizing. Which white supremacy is.
I would be interested in the governor letting us how African Americans can best take part in this celebration along side our white confederate brothers and sisters. Dress up as happy slaves maybe?