I served in the mississippi house of representatives for district 84, about 16,000 people in the whole county. everybody knows everybody. everybody knows, i m not here to argue the design of the flag. that is not my intent. some universities took the flag down. in state dollars and in public universities, and you should display whatever that symbol is. do you think this is an issue that matters to the people in your district? yes, ma am. why? i just think it s a heritage, it s a history. there s a big movement to remove confederate history.
I guess the simple term is whitewash, as i told my class, that a lot of time, you want to see the good part of the history, especially history that you are part of, and you want to minimize the bad part about it. slavery is not an easy topic to tackle for black or for white. so how do you tackle the story of slavery? one thing is that the slaves were more powerful than we give them credit for. people said lincoln freed the slaves, but you say, actually, they freed themselves. that was a question. why couldn t slaves free themselves in a sense before all of this if they freed themselves? you didn t have the abolition movement. you didn t have those people step forward. but those people, to me, were just as brave as the 1960s, probably even more brave. think about nat turner.
Generation would keep them natural in that sense, and they would not be racists. i don t think that slavery and the civil war and jim crow should be forgotten. i think they should be remembered because i think they are an important lesson that america isn t perfect, and to work against that in the future. if you look at things like that incarceration rate for, you know, young black men in this country, and why is it so disproportional, or why you have the socioeconomic situation that you have, between white people, black people, that you can see this didn t come out of nowhere. this isn t a reflection of the tone of somebody s skin. it s based in history that goes back before your generation, before my generation, before my grandparent s generation. i mean, it goes way back. i think there s a balance between, like, recognizing our past, but also not over-talking
Everyone is well taken care of. some people are owned by other people, but everyone is well fed, well clothes, loved and appreciated. and that is not this is why something like this would appeal to white northerners, because that s not the environment that they lived in. it s really a story about the merits of white supremacy. you know, i saw another history, and it said it was really white supremacy that helped the north and the south reunify after the war. isn t that true? i fully believe that when we re talking, even across the spectrum from the coming of the civil war, to the prosecution of, it and the aftermath, i think it s much more proactive approach to describe and understand white supremacy, that it is to even talk about slavery. slavery doesn t survive, but white supremacy does. the war ends, reconciliation has been achieved. what happens unexpectedly is
Documentary filmmaker Rachel Boynton travels across the United States exploring how Americans tell the story of the Civil War. Filmed from the last year of.