And not once does he talk about slavery, property, and what the war is really about, what they re really fighting for. other voices? yeah. i noticed there seems to be a common idea that the civil war was totally about slavery. i m gonna disagree with that. the south did want to leave the union, because of slavery, but the issue of the civil war was keeping the south in the union. so slavery isn t like, the entire issue. pushback? comments? we re gonna continue tomorrow. we have class tomorrow. you are a thinker. that is for sure. the wedge is this labor issue, right? i think we re agreed on that. it s just the way of describing it. good job. go, go, go. you re spending a lot of time telling the story of the civil war and reconstruction, in your 8th grade class, why? because i think we have not adequately, you know, understood who we are as a nation. there s so much of this history that has been way too difficult for this country to look at. the reason it s important to
Well, it s part of history. you know, where and when is enough? do you feel like slavery was something that was in the past, let s move on? or do you feel like slavery still has an effect today? it s over. and it is part of history, it s part of the past. i don t know any person that owns a slave, or has been a slave. to this day. i think we re gonna make it a major issue, as long as we keep rubbing it in from the standpoint of the minority saying, well, we were slaves and mistreated. i understand that. what the hell you want me to do about it? i m sorry. i wasn t there. i m 50 years old. i wasn t there. and what do you say to historically black universities that say, we re not gonna fly this flag because it s a symbol of slavery? do you think about their point of view? it is a state flag of mississippi. but if they say it actually hurts us, it deeply offends us.
North, the war was a distant thing. we re both members of the local sons of confederate veterans, and we are responsible for taking care of that cemetery. but our generation is that, there s not gonna be anybody around to take care of it. or to promote the true history of the 1860 - 1865 time. this class that i m filming, the teacher is teaching the cause of the war on slavery. oh, really? and so, does that offend you? i mean, can you explain to me why. yes, because it s not true. you re telling stories that are untrue about my ancestors, about my family, about my country, the south. and tell me what the untrue thing is? slavery. they are not telling the whole story. slavery was one of the reasons, but for that professor to say that economics had nothing to do with that war is totally false. i would have fought for the south, you know why?
Social order. i don t have to worry about my child tomorrow being confronted by totally unusual and repugnant ideas, or totally unusual and repugnant people. i am safe by the history i know. so, the lost cause tradition that southerners developed this story for their explanation of their defeat. it came ultimately a victory narrative. victory over reconstruction. and they crushed the very idea of slavery as the central cause, and the very idea of emancipation of 4 million slaves as the central result of the civil war. they began to see white scale, even official efforts, to crush what we might call black memory. if we throw away our confederate flag, we throw away
That s why they re probably, when you re teaching i keep going back to the teaching. it s where it all starts because i doubt if a white man would tell his six-year-old daughter we owned slaves, or we did this to slaves. i doubt if that happens. i think we all should learn the real history because, as black people, we think we know but we don t. i never met my great grandmother. you know, they don t talk about slavery, the racial segregation. they don t talk about it. would you want to ask her about it? i would. but i wouldn t, i think she would say she don t know to avoid the conversation. and why do you think she would want to avoid the conversation? it might hurt her. she might feel mad about it. it s hard to talk about