The Confederate Flag

 by Glenn N. Holliman

I Get It....

Several of my English friends have written asking for my thoughts on the retirement of the Confederate flag from southern government facilities after the tragic Charleston murders.  Their questions and opinions have been well meaning and informed, and my thanks for their 'ponderings'.

I have an opinion - removal of the Confederate Battle Flag is long overdue.  It belongs in a museum along with explanations how the cause of human slavery tarnished a region and a peoples.

Few folks are more southern than me.  I spent the first part of my life in and around Birmingham, Alabama, the 1960s symbol of white obstinacy and violence to defend the color line.   I went to segregated schools, and lustily sang Dixie at half time at football games. I once saw hundreds of black teenagers arrested for protesting in the streets of Gadsden, Alabama.   I even met and chatted for a while with George Wallace, the political demagogue of his time.

Civil rights leader of the time - Ralph Abernathy of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (the right hand person of Martin Luther King), 3rd from left, and Floyd Mekissick, the leader of the Congress of Racial Equality (straw hat) led hundreds south from Memphis through Mississippi in the summer of 1966 demonstrating for civil rights. Photographs by yours truly.

Likewise, I heard Martin Luther King speak and even marched in Mississippi for a time in 1966, coming down firmly on the side of enlarged human rights.  I saw and experienced it all - the hatred, the march of change and the bitter resistance of an earlier white generation.

This photo was taken by yours truly in the summer of 1966 when African-Americans and white sympathizers were on a pro-civil rights march in Mississippi.  As one can observe, not everyone embraced this larger view of American freedom.  The use of the Confederate flag in reaction to this event was all too normal. 

Yes, I  get it that it that today the Confederate flag for the majority of white folks, including 99% of my relatives, is about heritage, not hate. No one enjoys fried chicken, mashed potatoes, grits and Tennessee bourbon more than me (and my waist line shows it).  The Crimson Tide is still my team every autumn.  It is regional pride, and all sections of the country have such local pride. 

The South has changed for the better in the past half century....air conditioning has cooled our temperaments and, if you haven't noticed, the majority of football players in the Southeastern conference are our black brothers.  I get all this.

Alabama is where my grandparents, great grandparents, great-great, and great, great, great grandparents are buried.  Three of my great, great grandfathers died in Confederate service during the Civil War. Two of my great grandfathers were at the Crater in Petersburg and one at Pickett's Charge.  Alabama is where most of my paternal cousins still live, nicest people in the world.  I get it.

But, I also absorbed in my youth the strong tenants of Alabama and Tennessee Methodism, that one does not do to one's neighbor what one does not want done to oneself.  Sang, heard, prayed it and occasionally in my life, preached it.  And have tried to live it.  I got it.

So, when in response to Charleston, an African American writer states that the battle flag is a symbol of white supremacy and racial terror for many of her race, I get that to.  Because I know it is true.  I have seen it for generations with my own eyes.  Even Hollimans I know who are African-American and live in the South have told me.

Mississippi blacks on that humid, hot day almost 50 years ago, did not wave the Confederate flag.  They waved the Stars and Stripes.

 I have pride in the region of my birth in these United States.  But I have nothing but anger that slavery embedded itself centuries ago in the southern economy and over time convinced my ancestors that persons of color were inferior beings.  And that so many suffered as a result.   

In reality the pre-Civil War plantation was a slave labor camp with a big house of a few served by many.  It took force to keep slaves from running away.  Nothing prideful about that part of southern history; just disgusting and tragic.

So, yes, remove the flags that represented such terrible values and put them in museums.  Study our history, celebrate the good parts and learn from the tragic.  Will we as a people ever get it?


PS - I found an excellent map on the web today which traces the Atlantic slave trade.  Notice how in the 18th century the number of ships sailing from Africa to the Chesapeake Bay region significantly increased.

 http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html?ncid=newsltushpmg00000003


As ever comments welcome....

The School Makers

by Glenn N. Holliman


Several years ago Terry Barkley, librarian, archivist, musician and enthusiast of The Webb School, a boarding and day school in Bell Buckle, Tennessee, contacted me by telephone. He was writing a long over due book on John M. Webb, co-founder of the school that has turned out more Rhodes Scholar than any similar institution in the South.  I was happy to share my own memories and insights on the School.  From 1971-1981, I had been a teacher and administrator of the institution and had the opportunity to research the rich history of the school.

Mr. Barkley's call stirred memories of my wonderful years in rural Bell Buckle, still a population of less than 400, nestled against some outcroppings of the Highland Rim. This independent school for junior high and high school students was founded in 1870 in Culleoka, Maury County, Tennessee, and in 1886, re-located in Bedford County, approximately 20 miles south of Murfreesboro and 12 or so miles north east of Shelbyville. 

 
The Webb School was a founding combination of a charismatic administrator and orator, William R. 'Sawney' Webb and his more gentle, scholarly younger brother, John.  Together they worked together for four decades and left an educational legacy that continues to this day.  Terry Barkley has done a magnificent job, creating a narrative - part biography, part history and part analysis of the influence of the school and its alumni.  The Gentle Scholar can be purchased from the school or Braybree Publishing, Dickson, Tennessee.

The late Vermont Royster, a Pulitzer Prize editor of the Wall Street Journal and graduate of the school wrote once that the school in Bell Buckle was an anachronism even in his day (early 1930s).  During the years I was at Webb, a time of both economic recession and inflation, numerous boarding schools, especially military schools, closed.  Parents were demanding more comfortable facilities, additional amenities and enlarged curriculum.  Because of financial stress,  the continued growth in excellence of public schools and the development of local religious academies,  many schools succumbed to a dearth of students and shut their doors.

Decisions were made at Webb in the 1970s to once again open the school to female students and to reach out to the day student population of the rapidly expanding population in Murfreesboro.  Led by dynamic school heads, strong boards, faithful alumni and committed parents, the school has thrived.  Modern, expansive facilities grace an ever enlarging campus, and a robust endowment insures a scholarship base for deserving students.

Mr. Barkley's book is an excellent partner volume of Lawrence McMillin's 1971 biography of "Old Sawney", The Schoolmaker.  My well worn copy of the book is shown.  It is frayed at the edges because I used it in some of my history classes those decades ago.  

Published by the University of North Carolina Press, McMillin weaves the story of a North Carolina Civil War veteran, seriously wounded at Malvern Hill in 1862, his survival and his trial and tribulation in creating a mecca for learning in a recovering South.  

An outspoken, plain spoken and confrontational educator, William R. Webb, later gained notoriety as a public speaker, and was the last U.S. Senator elected by the Tennessee State Senate (1913).  In the early 1970s, my wife, Lynn, the school librarian, and I supervised 'Sawney House', the dormitory for the younger boys.  Sadly, the house constructed in the 1880s, burned in the late 1970s, fortunately vacant as more modern boarding facilities had become available.

         

 My own modest contribution to the historical record was an article in  The Tennessee Historical Quarterly, Fall 1977.  Generally I focused on the William R. Webb's son, William R. Webb, Jr. who administered the school from the retirement of his father in the 1910s until his own retirement in the late 1950s.

So, thank you Terry for your fine exploration of what contributions a person of the humanities can make to society.  John M. Webb, may we have more of his kind who sought to know facts and subject them to thoughtful, critical analysis.  

An Article by my Daughter

by Glenn N. Holliman

Recently my daughter in Virginia wrote of her grandmother, now aged 91, and in poor mental health.  Her thoughts and writing are so poignant that it seem appropriate to share them with the larger world.  My mother's condition is a issue for millions of families as the population of those suffering from this horrible condition increases.  Here is some reading for reflection on aging and generational changes.

A Stuffed Dog, Violets and the Titmice....

"There are two plants on the table by my front window.  Two African violets that I brought to my home last August.  They survived the nine hour drive from my grandmother's assisted living facility in Nashville.  One violet has purple blooms the other white.  My grandmother nurtured these violets, not in her apartment, but in the hallway window for all the tenth floor residents of McKendree Village to enjoy.  At her new facility, she won't need her violets.

"I want to go home," my grandmother pleaded with us from a wheelchair in the rehab center.  She had fallen again.  During her hospitalization, it was discovered she had a urinary tract infection prompting a round of antibiotics, a drug that seems to make her failing memory worse.  

"My doggie and I want to go home."  She touched a stuffed animal to her cheek.  "We are taking you home, Granny.  To a new place in Cookeville, just two miles from your daughter Becky's house.  Doesn't that sound like a good idea?"

"I want to die.  I need to go to the bathroom."

"Is that my husband?", Granny asked as my father left to bring around the car.  "No, Granny, that's your son."

"My son.  I have a son?  He's handsome but he needs to lose some weight.  I want to go home.  Will you take me home?"

When I was growing up my grandmother liked to feed two things, her family and the birds.  When I would visit for a week in the summer each morning we ate scrambled eggs, bacon and toast with fresh honey.  I would stare out the window at the feeder as Granny named the birds that joined us for breakfast.  Robins, goldfinches, blue jays, which she never cared for, and titmice.  Titmice.  The name always made me giggle.

"Mom, what's the name of that bird?" my daughter asked last December.  We had just put up a bird feeder. "A Carolina chickadee," I said, "or a black capped chickadee.  It's very difficult to tell them apart."

"How do you know that Mom?"  

As we cleaned out my grandmother's apartment and downsized her to a single room in a memory care facility, I was offered chairs, a desk, and a various assortment of knickknacks.  I refused those items and asked if I could have her African violets.  I would get them home safely.  Transplant them into larger pots. Pots with cute fish faces on them.  I would set them on the table in my front window.

They can sit with my daughters and watch the robins, goldfinches, blue jays, which my grandmother never cared for, and, of course the titmice." - GAH