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	Workers Vanguard No. 959	21 May 2010

Virginia Governor Salutes Slavocracy

“Confederate History Month”: Racist Garbage

Almost 150 years after the armed rebellion of the slaveowning Southern ruling class against the growing domination of the capitalist class in the North, we are still being subjected to the spectacle of unreconstructed apologists for the Confederacy beating the drum for the “lost cause.” This time, it’s the governor of Virginia, Robert McDonnell, who at the behest of the Sons of Confederate Veterans declared April Confederate History Month in Virginia. Adding insult to injury, in nary a one of the six “whereas” clauses in his original proclamation announcing this paean to the slavocracy did the governor mention the word “slavery.”

When called out about his “omission,” McDonnell—whose intellect was “refined” by earning a law degree at televangelist Pat Robertson’s Regent University, formerly the Christian Broadcasting Network University—retorted: “There were any number of aspects to that conflict between the states. Obviously, it involved slavery. It involved other issues. But I focused on the ones I thought were most significant for Virginia.” Obviously, the millions of black people held as chattel were not “significant” for the governor.

Among those who embrace the “heritage” of the slaveholders, it’s a common refrain: the Civil War wasn’t about slavery. But as Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, laid out in his famous 1861 “Cornerstone” speech, “Our new Government is founded…its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

Virginia is the state where the most Civil War military engagements were fought, during which tens of thousands of Union soldiers, black and white, laid down their lives stamping out the system of slavery. It is the state where slaveowner Robert E. Lee was finally defeated and surrendered. It also is the state where the Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with a campaign of “Massive Resistance” in the late 1950s, as the segregationist state government closed down public schools, sometimes for years, rather than desegregate. When Democrat Doug Wilder, then a state legislator and later the first black governor of Virginia, pushed for a holiday to honor Martin Luther King in 1984, what he finally accepted was King’s name tacked on to the preexisting state holiday for Confederate generals Lee and Stonewall Jackson! Up to this day, a major artery through northern Virginia, right across the Potomac from the Lincoln Memorial, is named Jefferson Davis Highway.

For the better part of a century, the Democrats, earlier the main party of the slaveholders, ruled the Jim Crow South with an iron fist supplemented by Klan terror. In the supposedly “post-racial” America of Barack Obama, who preaches the lie that the civil rights movement moved the U.S. “90 percent of the way” to ending racism, black people are still branded by their skin color. Specially oppressed as a race-color caste at the bottom of this capitalist society, the black population is confronted every day with the legacy of chattel slavery. The enduring reality of the color line also serves to obscure the fundamental division of society into antagonistic social classes with irreconcilably opposed interests.

McDonnell’s Confederate History Month proclamation was issued amid a burgeoning white racist backlash, e.g., the Tea Party movement, over Wall Street Democrat Barack Obama’s ascendency to the White House. In fact, as Commander-in-Chief of U.S. imperialism, Obama is the overseer of the whole plantation, whose job is to enforce the racist capitalist status quo. The president created an uproar last Memorial Day when he sent a wreath to the Confederate war memorial in Arlington National Cemetery. The cemetery was built on Robert E. Lee’s opulent Virginia estate during the Civil War as a resting place for Union dead, and over 15,000 are buried there. Later, in the spirit of reconciliation between North and South, consolidated over the bloody, broken bodies of black people forced into peonage with the defeat of Reconstruction, a Confederate memorial was built, complete with a frieze depicting a black mammy taking care of a white baby and a slave boy going off to war with his master. Ever since Virginia-born arch-racist president Woodrow Wilson dedicated the memorial in 1914, presidents have been paying homage to the Confederate dead.

While Obama honors the rebel dead, we recall the first Memorial Day (earlier known as Decoration Day) before the holiday was later turned into a commemoration of U.S. imperialist warmongering. On 1 May 1865, in Charleston, South Carolina, nearly 10,000 former slaves marched onto the grounds of the old Washington Race Course, where wealthy Charleston planters and socialites had gathered before the war. During the final year of the war, the racecourse had been turned into a prison camp, where hundreds of Union soldiers died and were buried. Black schoolchildren marched by their graves, softly singing “John Brown’s Body” and decorating the graves with flowers. The former slaves were joined by several Union regiments, including the 104th and 35th Colored regiments, as well as the famous 54th Massachusetts. The liberators marched around the graves with the liberated in solemn salute.

The American Civil War was the last great bourgeois-democratic revolution. In pursuing its class interests, the Northern bourgeoisie was compelled to abolish black chattel slavery and destroy the old Southern plantation agricultural system. The recruitment of blacks into the Union Army helped turn the tide of the war. But the promise of black freedom was betrayed when the Northern capitalists formed an alliance with the remnants of the slavocracy in order to exploit Southern resources and the freedmen. The capitalist system in its youth was historically progressive, but today produces nothing but unmitigated horror. Our task is to build a revolutionary party that champions the cause of all the oppressed. Finish the Civil War—for black liberation through socialist revolution!