Lee Chapel

I went to Washington & Lee University School of Law in Lexington, Virginia. Robert E. Lee was the former president and he and his family are buried on campus. It's also the town Stonewall Jackson is from, and he's buried in a Confederate cemetery next to where my apartment was located.

At the beginning of your time in law school, everyone had to go to Lee Chapel to sign the honor code. We sat in a building that hung Confederate flags over the crypt of a man who didn't believe black students should have any legal rights, much less going to school to learn about protecting other people's rights. We sat in that building while black students were lectured about morality and the importance of honorable ethics.

On Lee-Jackson Day, the same weekend as MLK Day, those students had to walk to campus past the parade of locals wearing a knockoff of their long-dead ancestor’s uniform, waving their flag on Main Street, and went to school at a place that treated the men as heroes in an on-campus museum. I can't know what it felt like. But I've been told by several students that they felt like the 1860s weren't so far in the past. I've been told that they were afraid. And after seeing someone murdered in Charlottesville this weekend, about an hour from Lexington, they had every right to be fearful.

Those that say they are celebrating heritage with their Confederate flags and monuments are correct. It is heritage they're celebrating. But what is that heritage? By the 1890s, as a reaction to Reconstruction, Southern states started passing the Jim Crow laws that separated people based on race. In 1915, the movie Birth of a Nation was released, presenting a perverted version of Reconstruction in which black people could never be integrated as equals and the KKK had honorable and justified goals. The KKK was revived, and that’s when the 20th century saw a resurgence of white robes and burning crosses. That’s also when the Robert E. Lee monument in Charlottesville was erected, in 1924. And the Confederate flag? It wasn’t actually the flag of the Confederate States of America, but the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia. It didn’t become associated with Southern “heritage” until Birth of a Nation featured it prominently, and became popular when the Dixiecrats used it heavily in 1948 to protest desegregation. That’s the heritage they’re fighting to celebrate.

Help me make politics something we can be proud of. If you've saved your payment information with ActBlue Express, your monthly donation will go through immediately: Express Donate: $5 a month Express Donate: $10 a month Express Donate: $25 a month Or, donate another amount Now imagine being told that the monuments should stay up so a group of people can celebrate their "heritage.” Then you learn that their “heritage” is fabricated from whole cloth and has nothing to do with Southern history, but was created decades later for the explicit purpose of white supremacy. Then you’re told that this “heritage,” which says that you aren’t even human, trumps your right to live without fear.

We need to come together as a country. That will never happen as long as we fail to understand our own history and allow these monuments to continue to stand. It’s time to move forward and create a heritage of which we can all be proud.

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