Hurry, students! You've still got time!

The State of Alabama is here for you. Thanks to forward-thinking legislators in the 1950s, the Heart of Dixie will help you pay for school, to earn a scholarship to the college of your choice. All while honoring Alabama's noble history.

All you must do is submit an essay of 1,500 -2,500 words on the life of Confederate Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson to the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Do it by April 2, and you could receive one of several "repayable scholarships" of up to $3,000.

All thanks to the Stonewall Jackson Memorial Fund, established by the Legislature in 1955 to "memorialize that great American."

Wait.

So it's not really a scholarship at all? It's an interest-free loan that must be repaid after graduation?

Yep.

And ... it's not about an Alabamian? It's about a slave-owning Confederate general from Virginia who was killed by friendly fire and has become, by his own descendants' reckoning, a divisive symbol of racism?

That's right.

Don't blame Archives and History. They're just the guys politicians put in charge of administering this thing. The trustees of the fund got sued in the '80s for violating the spirit of the law when - heaven forbid - they awarded money for essays on subjects as diverse as the "impact of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin.'"

Ed Bridges, then Director of Archives and History, argued in 1988 that public money "should be inclusive of all areas of history," and said even an essay on MLK would suffice. Which was right and reasonable. So of course a judge saw otherwise, and ordered that all the money be spent as the Legislature demanded: to celebrate Jackson.

Nobody else. Just the Confederate general from Virginia.

So now, current Archives Director Steve Murray says, there is $93,229 and some Alabama Power stock certificates in the fund, and each year a few students - "well under 10, and sometimes just a handful," submit essays.

Some years there have been no winners, for there have been no worthy entries.

Stonewall Jackson.

But the department, as the law demands, administers the contest without complaint and seeks repayment of scholarships when the time comes.

A school loan is not worth this trouble. It's not worth this statement.

The Stonewall Jackson Memorial Fund is just another vestige of the 1950s, those happy days of poodle skirts, rock-around-the-clock and rabid racism.

That was when defiance over desegregation created pander-monium in Montgomery. It was when the Confederate Battle Flag became a thing, when white supremacists and slavery apologists launched a movement to deify the Confederate cause and vilify those who would point out its flaws.

So now Alabama is stuck in the uncomfortable position of urging young people to extoll the virtues of a "great American" who was killed fighting against ... America.

While - as the Southern Poverty Law Center pointed out in a report last week - all of America does a terrible job teaching the consequences of slavery, students lack basic knowledge and teachers are ill-equipped to tell the whole story.

Enough. Until we are honest about our roots - and motivations - we will be ruled by the demons of our past.

Stonewall Jackson's great-great-grandsons, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, last year argued that even Virginia should remove monuments to the general.

"We are writing to say that we understand justice very differently from our grandfather's grandfather," they said in an open letter to Slate.com and to Richmond politicians. "We wish to make it clear his statue does not represent us."

If only Alabama were bold enough to say the same.

John Archibald's column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.