By Hunter Wallace

I used to believe that Anthony Hervey was a black eccentric.

When I first saw him at the “Marching Through Oxford” rally last August, I didn’t know what to think of him. I was unfamiliar with his long history of public activism in Mississippi in support of Southern heritage and the Mississippi State Flag. Here was a black man dressed up as a Confederate soldier, carrying a Confederate Battle Flag, and holding two signs denouncing White guilt and anti-racism.

I noticed at the time and mentioned it in my report that of all the people who participated in that event and carried the Confederate Battle Flag that it was Hervey who provoked the most visceral negative reaction:

At the time, I was only aware of less than half a dozen of these “black Confederates” in the entire country, HK Edgerton and Karen Cooper being by far the most famous within the Heritage movement. I didn’t see HK, Hervey, Cooper, etc as representing any significant faction within the black community. There are Jewish Nazis and self-hating White Southerners, right? That’s how I dismissed the phenomenon.

I believe it was yesterday morning, well before reports surfaced of the accident, when someone made a comment either on this website or on Facebook that caused a lightbulb to go off in my head. They said that the reason we see so few of these “black Confederates” speaking out in public is not because they don’t exist. Rather, it is because they are silenced, intimidated and forced to conform by other blacks who bitterly resent Whites, the Confederacy, and despise black conservatives as “Uncle Toms.”

The gears started whirling in my head as I thought about it. I recalled that shooting in Birmingham’s Railroad Park which was witnessed by hundreds of black people and how no one except one individual was willing to step forward and “snitch” to the police. The victim in that case was a 15-year-old black kid, Jarmaine Walton, not a self-styled black Confederate like Anthony Hervey. Truly, #BlackLivesMatter is an absurd slogan in some quarters of Birmingham’s black community.

Then I remembered the nasty reception that Anthony Hervey got in Oxford on that blistering hot August afternoon. I remembered the confrontation involving HK Edgerton that I saw in Linn Park. I remembered hearing “Uncle Tom” dropped more than once. For the first time, I put myself in his shoes and thought about the risk he was taking by sticking his neck out as a pro-Confederate black man.

I thought to myself: was Anthony Hervey really that eccentric?

He was eccentric enough to drive from Oxford, MS to Birmingham, AL and sit for hours in the mid-July sun to oppose those who wanted to trash a Confederate monument. The only kind of person who would do that is someone who loves the South and is willing to make a sacrifice to preserve our heritage. I thought about how I had driven from Eufaula, AL to Oxford, MS last year, where I met Anthony Hervey for the first time, or how I had driven all the way from St. Louis to be in Birmingham.

If Anthony Hervey is an eccentric, then what does that say about me? The fact is, we shared quite a few of the same beliefs. In light of his book, Why I Wave The Confederate Flag, Written By a Black Man: The End of Niggerism and the Welfare State, it seems we both had a low estimate of the Black Undertow. I’ve written at length about the Black Undertow and all the lives this insidious force has destroyed.

In 2015, the Left is the new Klan in Mississippi, and “Uncle Tom” was basically lynched yesterday. The “climate of hate” and intolerance against black conservatives has produced its first victim.