While much of our nation celebrates Juneteenth, the GOP increase its defense of white supremacy
The fight against the forces of white supremacy continues
In 2021, President Biden signed legislation that designated Juneteenth (June 19th) a federal holiday. This day commemorates the freeing of the last enslaved people of the Confederacy on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas by Union troops-- two months after the Civil War effectively ended and a full two years after President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
At the signing ceremony for this landmark legislation, Biden declared, “By making Juneteenth a federal holiday, all Americans can feel the power of this day and learn from our history – and celebrate progress and grapple with the distance we’ve come (and) the distance we have to travel.”
In reality, what we are seeing today from the GOP is not a “celebration” of progress but a concerted effort to move America backwards in defense of white supremacy that in some respects matches the racism that was the underpinnings of the Confederacy. I wish I were exaggerating.
Despite the lies by some defenders of the Confederacy, its foundation was white supremacy as the Vice President of the Confederacy, Alexander Stephens, made clear in his infamous “cornerstone speech.” That is when Stephens declared in March 1861 to a “raucous crowd” in Georgia that the Confederate states, “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 normal condition.”
Stephens added, “This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” He was not hiding what the Confederacy was about – but rather bragging that this new white supremacist nation would “be the first in the history of the world.”
Today we see a GOP that is animated to various degrees by that same sentiment—combined with white victimhood fueled in large part by the white right’s fear of losing power.
This helps explain why in the past week Ron DeSantis and Mike Pence vowed to re-name a military base in North Carolina to honor a slave owning, traitor to the United States: Confederate General Braxton Bragg. (The base was recently renamed Fort Liberty from Fort Bragg in accordance with a federal law enacted in 2021 to remove the names of Confederate military leaders from nine military bases.)
DeSantis declared at last Saturday’s North Carolina GOP state convention in support of honoring the treasonous Bragg: “It’s an iconic name and iconic base, and we’re not gonna let political correctness run amok in North Carolina.”
Former Vice President Pence at the same GOP convention echoed that pledge, stating, “We will end the political correctness in the hallways of the Pentagon, and North Carolina will once again be home to Fort Bragg."
As DeSantis and Pence must know, while Bragg had at one point served in the US military, by the time of the Civil War, he owned a Louisiana sugar plantation and 105 enslaved people. It was then that Confederate President Jefferson Davis asked Bragg to leave his plantation and serve as a general.
From there, Bragg took up arms against the United States and led armed forces that waged war on U.S. troops in defense of slavery and white supremacy. At the 1863 Battle of Chickamauga alone--where Bragg was uncharacteristically successful—his troops slaughtered more than 15,000 patriotic U.S. soldiers.
But these two are just following the lead of Donald Trump who, when in the White House, repeatedly defended naming this base after Bragg--as well as defending other bases named to honor former treasonous Confederate officers. Trump even threatened to veto the bipartisan defense funding bill Congress passed in 2020 that included renaming military bases that bore the name of Confederate generals, tweeting at the time: “I will Veto the Defense Authorization Bill…which will lead to the renaming (plus other bad things!) of Fort Bragg, Fort Robert E. Lee, and many other Military Bases.”
At the time, a Morning Consult poll found 76 percent of Republicans opposed removing the names of the Confederate military leaders from these bases. Trump, DeSantis and Pence all get that defending Confederate heroes plays great with the bigoted GOP base.
Even more recent evidence of the GOP’s embrace of white supremacy can be seen in their reaction to the Juneteenth holiday. A UMass Amherst poll released earlier this week found that nearly 70 percent of Democrats support Juneteenth being designated a federal holiday.
What percent of Republicans per this new poll support Juneteenth as a holiday? Only 13 percent. Are you saying that nearly 90% of Republicans truly hate the idea of another day off from work?! Of course not. They oppose our nation commemorating a day that reminds people of the barbaric chattel slavery that was imposed on Blacks by white Americans.
It's the same reason the white right wants to ban courses and books about Black history in school under the guise of Critical Race Theory. (CRT.) These CRT bans are supported by 80 percent of Republicans nationwide--almost the same percentage that oppose Juneteenth being a holiday.
The GOP base views teaching students about the suffering of Blacks at the hands of whites—as well as teaching about Black achievement—as a threat to white supremacy.
Republican voters’ hostility to teaching Black history in school, however, did not happen overnight but has been building over the past two decades. As Michael Tesler, a political science professor at the University of California at Irvine noted in a 2018 analysis for The Washington Post, in 2000, the percentage of Americans who thought too much Black history was being taught in public schools was in the single digits for Democrats and in the single digits for Republicans. Tesler noted that “Democrats haven’t changed in the past two decades. Republicans, however, are now 30 points more likely to say schools should teach less black history.”
And a 2021 USA Today poll further evidences this partisan divide on teaching race in schools. That poll asked if parents supported teaching about the “ongoing effects of slavery and racism in the United States” in school. While 82 percent of Democrats said yes, only 38 percent of Republicans supported teaching about the same.
What we are dealing with in the United States is a growing sense of desperation by some on the white right to maintain power. That is what the Trump incited Jan 6 terrorist attack was all about. Just look at the results of the University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats analysis of the Jan 6 attackers. They found that 93 percent of those arrested were white. That is unlikely surprising but what was unexpected was that more than half of those arrested didn’t come from red areas of the country. Rather, the attackers hailed “from counties where the white share of the population is declining fastest.”
These people were seeing first-hand literally the loss of white supremacy and they then engaged in violence to defend it. This is the same preservation of white supremacy that the Confederacy’s Vice President Stephens declared was the basis for their new nation.
In Abraham Lincoln’s first inaugural address in March 1861—a few weeks before Stephens’s cornerstone speech—he made a plea to avoid the Civil War, telling those in the South that “we must not be enemies” as he appealed to “the better angels of our nature.” A little over a month later on April 12, 1861, the horrific Civil War began when Confederate troops fired on Fort Sumter in South Carolina's Charleston Harbor.
That war waged by the Confederates to defend white supremacy ended finally on June 19, 1865 (Juneteenth) when the last enslaved people of the Confederacy were freed. Yet today, we are locked again in a battle with those same forces that mock and demean the “better angels of our nature” while they celebrate cruelty and bigotry.
Lincoln’s words from his famous Gettysburg Address delivered at the dedication in November 1863 of a new national cemetery near the Gettysburg battlefield ring in my ears as I see what we are faced with. That is when Lincoln declared, “Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.”
The reality is that for many of today’s white right that war continues. And we must be prepared to defeat them at the ballot box in 2024 to ensure as Lincoln prayed at Gettysburg, that this “government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
We are, presently and truly, engaged in a Second Civil War.
As a military wife who actually lived at Ft. Bragg for two years, whose kids went to Ft. Bragg schools, I'd say I've got a dog in this fight and my dog is bigger and stronger than those of the cowardly former VP or the malevolent, vicious governor. And I wholeheartedly support the name change. The men and women who have served there through the years served in support of liberty and freedom. Bravo Ft. Liberty!