Revising Opinions of Robert E. Lee
He wasn't really anti-slavery, and he chose treason over defending the union. Should his birthday be a holiday? Should statues honoring him be taken down? Should Washington & Lee change its name?
Yeah, that’s me in the 1990s taking a nap near the final resting place of what some of my ancestors called the sainted Confederate Civil War General Robert E. Lee at Lee Chapel in Lexington, VA. Eyeing the picture, an older Southern gentleman suggested I was insufficiently respectful to “master Robert.”
I found it appalling — and still do — that Mississippi, Alabama, and Arkansas still have one holiday honoring both Martin Luther King’s birthday, January 15, 1929, and Lee, born on January 19, 1807. Will the South ever let go of its glorification of its white supremacist past?
What an insult to
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