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A Southern Man’s Tribute To MLK [1]
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Date: 2023-01-16
I Now Stand Against Injustice
A SOUTHERN MAN’S TRIBUTE TO MLK
I was born in 1954 and grew up in Richmond Virginia, the Capital of the Confederacy during the Civil War. My family settled in Jamestown in 1652 and they owned slaves right up until the end of that war, on tobacco farms between Richmond and Williamsburg. As a child I idolized Robert E. Lee and we kids staged mock battles fighting the Yankees, no one ever wanted to be the Yankee. I had a confederate hat, musket, toy canon and a Lee action figure along with his horse Traveler.
My mother went to work as an operating nurse every day across the street from a giant statue of General Jeb Stuart on horseback located on Monument Avenue, a road dedicated to Southern heroes of that war. I later went to University of Mississippi and walked past the dormitory where James Meredith, the first black student at the school, endured endless harassment in the 1960s. (They bounced a basketball on the floor above his room 24 hours a day). They handed out small confederate battle flags before every football game to the fans. Tens of thousands of us waved them.
I never made the connection between the memorabilia and symbols of that war and slavery. Most of us living in the South during that time didn’t. It was a tragic omission from our education. Today some politicians want to bring back the days where it isn’t mentioned in schools, and a lot of white people are just fine with that. Social injustice makes me angry. I push back hard on it and will walk in the streets to protest it.
My tribute to the legacy of Martin Luther King is the man I became.
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