"The present focus on symbols of slavery reminds me of growing up in the 1930's when some 10,000 former slaves were still alive in the US.

One of the few times I heard any mention of slavery was in connection with the Federal Writers Project, a New Deal program that published a booklet of interviews with ex-slaves.

What struck me was the variety of experiences. At one extreme was the border state slave that was allowed to work for neighbors and keep the money he earned. At the other extreme were slaves from plantations beaten and abused by oppressive overseers.

Civil war veterans were still around in the 1930's . None would say the war was about slavery. The Union veterans said they fought to preserve the union , and the Confederates to defend against Northern invasion of Southern States

In the late 1960's when the American black family structure had begun to crumble and the number of babies born out of wedlock was increasing some blamed slavery. But in the 1930's the vast majority of black families were intact.

My maternal grandfather died when I was 14 recalled playing with slave children when he was a child. Like most Southern families, his owned no slaves. In addition to being ethically opposed to slavery, he found it uneconomically. In the 1850's buying a slave cost more than what people made in a year. The slave and his family, if he had one, needed a place to live as well as food and clothing and care when sick or old. Showing a bit of regional bias , my grandfather said that in the North an employer could hire an immigrant pay them a pittance and let them go when they were too old or too sick to work.

A few years ago, before the current assault on Confederate statues people were up in arms about the public display of the Confederate flag. In the 1930's the flag was hardly ever displayed in the South. I would attribute that to a song popular in the postbellum South, "The Conquered Banner". The lyrics were a 1865 poem by Father Abram Joseph Ryan, a Confederate army chaplain , who became known as "poet laureate of the postwar South".

The last stanza exhorted: "Furl that banner...unfold it never". Robert E. Lee strongly agreed. In 1869 he wrote of his desire to "obliterate the marks of civil strife, to commit to oblivion the feelings of endangered".

Only in the 1950's did the greatly proliferated flag become a symbol of the opposition to desegregation with the flag design even appearing on beach towels and bikinis. Father Ryan and General Lee would have been appalled by the base exploitation of the old Conquered Banner. And African-Americans, who have every reason to be offended by the flag ,understandably delight in its increasing disappearance from public view"

William Lloyd Stearman
Author
An American Adventure, From Early Aviation Through Three Wars to the white House

Personal Best Regards: