Blog Post
Date: Mon, 11 Jan 2010
From: Harold D. Thomas - ht@davrie.net
Mr. Edgerton:
I am a secessionist acquaintance of Mike Tuggle, who publishes a blog known as The Ohio Republic. I sent out an e-mail recently asking for names of African-Americans who were vocal in support of libertarian or secessionist causes, and your name came up in connection with your site Southern Heritage 411.
The purpose of this e-mail is to inform you that I would like to honor you, along with Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, and Ian Baldwin in a post next Monday. My proposed text is shown below. Please review, and if publication is agreeable to you, suggest any changes you would like for me to make by this Friday.
Harold
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H.K. Edgerton
H.K. Edgerton's photo will probably arouse a sense of cognitive dissonance. How in the world does an African-American associate with the Confederate flag? * Very simply, because he is proud of his heritage, which includes ancestors who fought for the Confederacy. He is a secessionist because he wants to preserve his distinctly Southern culture and, like the rest of us, free it from the tyranny of Washington.
In his website Southern Heritage 411, he exhaustively documents the historically valid reasons that the War between the States was fought – and the preservation of slavery was not prominent among them. He explains that 50,000 blacks fought on the Confederate side for the same reasons that Japanese-Americans fought for America in the Pacific Theater in World War II ** – first to defend their homes and families from outside aggression, and secondly, to prove to the world that they could fight with as much integrity and valor as anyone else.
Mr. Edgerton neither ignores nor condones the fact that slavery existed, and acknowledges that some slaveowners greatly abused their slaves; but he points out that some of those slaveowners were black. In other words, contrary to what most of us were taught in school, not all blacks in the antebellum South were mistreated or oppressed.
And, by the way, he's no "Uncle Tom" either. Mr. Edgerton was president of the Asheville, North Carolina, chapter of the NAACP in the late 1990s, and serves as chairman of the board of directors of the Southern Legal Resource Center. ***
* The flag is actually that of the State of Mississippi, but you get my point.
** Despite the fact that their families were being interned in concentration camps on the order of the United States Government.
*** Not to be confused with the Southern Poverty Law Center.
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Dear Harold,
I am now presently the Chairman of The Board of Advisors Emeritus of the Southern Legal Resource Center. Thanks for the recognition.
HK
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