By Hunter Wallace

Driving to Birmingham from St. Louis, we didn’t arrive at the “Monumental Dixie” rally in Linn Park until around 12:30 PM. Thus, we only saw the very tail end of the event. Hundreds of people had been there earlier in the day, but the crowd was smaller when we arrived due to the brutal heat and humidity. The Alabama Flaggers had a health scare and were forced to leave early.

When we finally got there, HK Edgerton had the microphone and was in the middle of giving his familiar “I am the flag” speech, which I had seen before in Columbia, SC and Oxford, MS. At first glance, the event looked and sounded like every other pro-Confederate rally hosted by the Heritage movement I had ever seen.

It was a very hot day in mid-July in Birmingham. I reached down to grab a bottled water and a slice of watermelon.

Next up, a black woman unfamiliar to me took the microphone. She gave a speech about all the stupid crap – tearing down monuments, burning Confederate flags, banning Dukes of Hazzard, etc – that has happened since the Dylann Roof shooting in Charleston. To a great round of applause, she tore up and burned her NAACP membership card. Hell, that was so great that I clapped myself.

Although he was out of uniform, I recognized Anthony Hervey from Oxford, MS who was sitting behind the speakers. He was at the “Marching Through Oxford” event with the Mid-South Flaggers last August. I laughed to myself at the thought that the SPLC and the media were going to portray this event as yet another “hate rally” on the same level as the carnival that was unfolding at the South Carolina Statehouse where the Klan, NSM, and the New Black Panthers were squaring off.

In reality, there has been a noticeable groundswell of these “black Confederates” since Charleston. There have been black faces at virtually all of these events. We’ve had black people coming out to join our own events in Stafford, VA and Gainesville, FL. In fact, it was a self-styled “black Rebel” who organized the recent flagging of Obama in Oklahoma City. I used to dismiss this phenomenon as just a handful of well known black eccentrics like HK, Hervey, and Karen Cooper, but now they are so omnipresent that I believe they represent a minority faction within the black community.

My friend William Flowers, the Vice Chairman of the Georgia League of the South, was the next speaker. Once again, he gave a rousing speech about the genocide we are facing and the need to secede from the Union. In his words, he hadn’t come to Birmingham “to bring milk for the babies” and his thunderous delivery left a greater impression on me than his previous speeches in Montgomery and Jackson. I thought to myself he’s getting better at this, gaining confidence, and this “follow me” style of public speaking is what we have been missing for a long time in the League of the South

Two more League speakers followed William: Rayn Owens, who hammered home again the reality of the genocide we are facing, and William Cawthon, a writer at the Abbeville Institute who spoke about a new organization that was recently founded to defend our Southern heritage. We will have more on that in the weeks ahead. The final speaker was Deanna Frankowski, a local activist for conservative causes in Birmingham who organized the “Monumental Dixie” rally, whose name I immediately recognized from the “Make Them Listen” protests against the Obama amnesty the previous summer.

My first impression of “Monumental Dixie” as your typical Heritage movement event was inaccurate. It’s clear now that the Southern genocide that has followed in the wake of Charleston has shaked things up quite a bit both within the Heritage movement and across the South as a whole. Even if there is still a hangover in rhetoric from the 1990s and 2000s, the conversations that I saw led me to believe that lots of people are looking at our predicament with new eyes. Whereas secession might have sounded “radical” to them before, it now sounds a lot more plausible.

The only “hate” that I saw at Monumental Dixie was directed at HK Edgerton, not by us, but by an irate black woman who opposed the event and a handful of her supporters. I believe that I heard “Uncle Tom” dropped more than once. I also believe the Birmingham police made several arrests from among the ranks of the scattered opposition. Generally speaking, our crowd was peaceful and festive and was more of a reunion of friends. There is a dawning realization in the Heritage movement that “Heritage, Not Hate” is an obsolete slogan because the real, genocidal level of hate is directed against them by those who hate White people, the South, and Christianity.

I’ve saved the best for last:

Directly to the right of the Confederate monument in Linn Park, there is another monument which hasn’t attracted controversy: it’s a monument to American imperialism, specifically, to the American soldiers who fought in the Spanish-American War and even more outrageously to those who put down the Filipinos in the Philippine-American War and the Chinese in the Boxer Rebellion!

What kind of world do we live in when soldiers who died defending their homes are politically incorrect, but those who died in distant overseas wars fighting as mercenaries to oppress foreigners are worthy of honor and respect?

Note: A similar event went down in Huntsville which attracted over 70 supporters of the Confederate monument there.

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