Press Conference - Orlando, Florida

From: H.K. Edgerton [mailto:hk@csaweb.org]
Sent: Tuesday, August 22, 2006 10:22 AM
To: 'exec@slrc-csa.org'
Subject: Press Conference, Orlando, Florida

At the request of Florida Commander Bob Adams of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, on Friday August 18, Terry Lee and I attended a press conference along side the Honorable Nelson Windbush and a host of other compatriots of the Sons in Orlando, Florida. Commander Adams would so eloquently lay out how the wonderful college scholarship program would benefit; one ironically named in honor of Mr.. Windbush's very own grandfather who just happens to be one of those so often forgotten Black Confederate Soldiers. He further pointed out how as a community organization just how those revenues would further enhance the many other community projects the Sons are actively involved in. However, we knew that as long as the Southern Cross would be the center of depiction on the plates ; the press wasn't going to let us off that easy. Mr.. Windbush built the coffin when he spoke of the Honorable General Nathan Bedford Forrest, and the service of his grand pa and the other loyal Black men who rode alongside the General. He continued own about the General's relation with the Black folk in Memphis, and further advanced the notion that Forrest not only would head up the Klan, but would be highly regarded as the first Civil Rights Leader for these very same Black folk.

It was now my time to speak, yet I pondered; here we stand at the base of a Confederate soldier who I had been told was now referred to as the minute man by the city council when they spoke of him, in a beautiful park donated to the city by a Confederate General named Summerlin. My thoughts would go even further down the road to Johnson C.Smith University, a traditionally Black College in Charlotte, N.C., where another Confederate Officer had donated his land, and even talked Yankee Soldiers into giving him the wood from the torn down Confederate hospital to build the school. Here I stood and the only thing I could think of was the kind of generosity a man must have in his heart to give so much to his community and the ultimate love and respect he must have for the man he called slave who gave so much loyalty and love of himself that he would now reciprocate. I could only speak of the honor and dignity earned, but now displaced by those who followed the same Reconstruction modus operandi that was used with the building of the Freeman's Bureau, and the establishment of the public school system in the South; divide and separate White and Black folks in the South by any means. Yes this license plate would create a great deal of dialogue, the poverty pimp's will surely come out with their distorted history and mouths dripping talks of racism, bigotry, and offense; yet never once taking one look in the mirror, or even evaluating the sum total of their very own wrong as they line their pockets while feasting at the tables of those who have taken the land, religion, and made a mockery of the Constitution , and who come again to finish destroying any vestige of the things we call Southern .