Jane DeNeefe, co-author of Alabama's Civil Rights Trail. (Bob Gathany | bgathany@al.com)

By Jane DeNeefe, co-director of Huntsville African American History Project and author of Rocket City Rock and Soul: Huntsville Musicians Remember the 1960s.

I am a white descendant of Confederate slaveholders on both sides of my family. My foremothers were members of the Daughters of the American Revolution and the United Daughters of the Confederacy. My father's family arrived when the French founded Old Mobile in 1702. Long before cotton plantations, before the United States or the Confederate States of America were even thought of, my ancestors held human beings in bondage. I am bothering to lay out this background to establish that I have as much claim to a slave-holding Confederate heritage as anyone living.

I doubt my grandmother realized how far back it went. Grandma Jane Abbot never saw the database of individual enslaved humans and their owners that historian Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and her team gleaned from early French and Spanish records. Grandma's family history, like most Alabama history, was pretty hazy with scattered names and places until you reached the American period. Without the benefit of modern scholarship, it was as though she viewed her family history by candlelight.

Grandmother Jane Abbot Toulmin DeNeefe 1930s courtesy Jane DeNeefe

Mobile still wasn't in the United States in 1804 when Grandma's ancestor Harry Toulmin arrived as a Jefferson appointee for federal judge of the Mississippi Territory. The Spanish still controlled everything south of the Ellicott line. Toulmin was a Unitarian whose early writings reveal a surprising anti-racism. However, as Alabama began to coalesce into a territory and then a state, Toulmin gradually adjusted to the economic life of the southern frontier and began to rely on slave labor. In 1819 he participated in Alabama's first constitutional convention, helping to enshrine slavery into the state's founding document. He codified Alabama's slave laws. When he died, in his will he declared only one of his slaves "fit for freedom."



By the time the judge's son T.L. had married his bride Amante, enslaving human beings as a labor force must have seemed normal to them. To enslave human workers was legal, constitutional and a foundation of the local economy. Their house has been moved from Toulminville out to the campus of the University of South Alabama as an example of Plantation Creole architecture.

Their sons were young men of the Confederate and Reconstruction south. Their stories are just one branch of the family lore my grandmother soaked up as a child about the gallantry and graciousness of antebellum Alabama. She was told that her ancestors were kind masters with well-fed slaves.

Jane Tate Moore as a small child with Lily circa 1918 by Jane DeNeefe

I have watched the study of southern history develop over decades and I know that for most of the twentieth century, history-loving Alabamians like my grandmother and I were subjected to white supremacist, pro-Confederate propaganda through state text books and public monuments. Most of these monuments were placed during the early 1900s backlash against biracial democracy in the south. Look at this timeline from the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy and their ilk dominated public discourse and memory about the antebellum south and about the Civil War and Reconstruction to the point that generations later, many well-meaning Alabama citizens are confused about what it all means.



It is only since the civil rights era that professionally-trained scholars have addressed the pervasive racist myths about the south propagated during the backlash that followed Reconstruction. Scholarship in recent decades has been like turning on a lamp in a room that was previously only candle-lit. Despite the increase of digital archives, documentaries and a resurgence of interest in family history, it remains difficult to penetrate the Confederate fog of public opinion widely shared by the white adults of Alabama.



In 1964, my parents brought our young family to Huntsville, the rocket city, a place of the future. In Huntsville, they tore down the old south courthouse and replaced it with a new, modern-looking building. Then they put the Confederate monument back in the yard. Huntsville first-grader Sonnie Hereford became the first black student in Alabama to integrate a previously white public school, but by high school he was still fighting to get a giant rebel flag removed from the gym wall at Butler High.

Snapshot of archival photos of Butler protests ("rebles") from Huntsville-Madison County Public Library Archives by Jane DeNeefe





Despite its early success in desegregation, Huntsville had trouble getting rid of the vestiges of its previously segregated public school system and, as of this writing, is still under a federal school desegregation order. When you consider a public school still using Rebel flags and the Dixie fight song in the 1970s, it is impossible to believe local leaders were trying very hard to create a sense of inclusiveness. Symbols matter.



Now, in 2017, in the full light of rational scholarship, it is past time for Huntsville to retire symbols of white supremacy and the Confederacy from public life. These symbols do not represent the collective beliefs of Madison County's people. They don't represent the anti-secessionists and abolitionists who lived in Huntsville before and during the war, or the enslaved Africans whose labor produced the county's cotton wealth. Confederate symbols do not represent today's Huntsvillians from other regions, from other countries, or with family roots in local antebellum slavery. All they do is encourage a discredited vision of the past.



Believing that the people of Madison County should be able to make this decision locally, without interference from Montgomery, the Tennessee Valley Progressive Alliance and several co-sponsoring organizations have launched a petition addressed to Huntsville's mayor and city council and the Madison County Commission, requesting that they move the Confederate monument at the courthouse to a place more fitting for a historical relic. If it were in a museum, it could be presented in its true historic context. If it were moved to Maple Hill Cemetery, it could stand guard over the Confederate soldiers and citizens resting there.



Wherever the statue ends up, the petition states, "remove it from the courthouse square, which is the symbolic heart of local government," because the courthouse should be a place of justice for all. In light of all we know now, my heritage-loving grandma would see the sense in that.