April 26 is Confederate Memorial Day in Georgia. The state also observes Robert E. Lee's birthday. I, for one, will not be joining the festivities. I view the idea of celebrating the Confederacy in any way the same as I would view celebrating the Third Reich. Yes, a lot of people died. It is deeply saddening that so many suffered. It is also deeply saddening that so many suffered because the Confederacy (and the Nazis) were dedicated to upholding a brutal system of white supremacy.

Politics Daily ran this column by Carl Cannon. I do not believe liberalism can protect democracy from Nazis or neo-Confederates, but I like his myth-busting analysis.

Why Liberals Are Right to Refuse to Honor the Confederacy
by Carl Cannon

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/04/12/why-liberals-are-right-to-refuse-to-honor-the-confederacy/

You wouldn't think, 145 Aprils after Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox, that we'd still be arguing about the causes of the conflict that led them to that place, and cost 620,000 Americans their lives. But we are, and arguing as well over a related question: Who should be honored – and who should be blamed?


Perhaps it is precisely because the price of keeping the union together was so dear that the passions endure, erupting every so often over one pretext or another. This month, the proximate cause of debate was the decision by Gov. Bob McDonnell of Virginia to keep a campaign promise he made to the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2005, when he was running for attorney general.

McDonnell's six-paragraph proclamation declared April to be "Confederate History Month." The governor appears to have seen the offending document as innocuous, and much of it was, but it was underpinned by a sentiment that does not reflect a universal view among Virginians; namely, that it is important to pay homage to "the sacrifices of the Confederate leaders, soldiers and citizens during the period of the Civil War." The proclamation also had had an important omission, these critics asserted, namely any reference to slavery.

In the outcry that followed, including personal protests from some high-profile African American Democrats from Virginia who had bolstered McDonnell's 2009 Republican candidacy, McDonnell quickly made amends. A new paragraph was inserted into the document:

WHEREAS, it is important for all Virginians to understand that the institution of slavery led to this war and was an evil and inhumane practice that deprived people of their God-given inalienable rights and all Virginians are thankful for its permanent eradication from our borders, and the study of this time period should reflect upon and learn from this painful part of our history ...

This is a pretty thorough mea culpa, and as direct a refutation of Southern revisionism as anyone could ask for, so continued criticism of McDonnell from liberal Democrats can understandably be viewed as partisan posturing. But political jockeying notwithstanding, liberals are indeed right to confront this issue forcefully, whenever it arises.

McDonnell's edict was issued on April 7, the date in 1865 on which a weary Robert E. Lee, his crumbling and starving Army of Northern Virginia near collapse, answered a letter from General Grant by saying he shared the Union commander's desire to avoid the further "useless effusion of blood" and inquiring what the terms of surrender might be.

Those terms did not include humiliation, Lee soon learned. On April 9, the Confederate commander was informed that his men could keep their lives, their horses, their dignity and their sidearms – including a handsome sword that Lee, in a new buttoned-up Confederate gray uniform, wore by his side when the two men met at the home of Wilmer McLean. Union Gen. Horace Porter, a Medal of Honor winner (and later Grant's personal secretary in the White House), thought the swordless Grant rather envied Lee's "long sword of exceedingly fine workmanship, the hilt studded with jewels."

But it is a historic fact that Grant never asked for it; moreover, in his own memoirs, published in 1885, Grant noted that the famous story – still repeated in some quarters to this day – of Lee proffering his sword to Grant only to have his Union counterpart respectfully hand it back is "the purest romance." In fact, Grant added, no mention of sidearms passed between the generals: Grant simply wrote it out in the terms of surrender, which Lee accepted.

Those terms could not, and did not mean facing up to what they had done – and why – and dealing with it honestly. It is often said that history is written by the victors, but this is not strictly true. The most chilling account of Agincourt that I've ever read didn't come from Henry V's side, or even Shakespeare. It came from by a Flemish knight named Jehan de Wavrin, who rode with the French and whose father and brother were killed in the battle.

So it is with Sons of the South and their famous "Lost Cause." Brandishing selective quotes from Abraham Lincoln, citing slogans about "states' rights," and emboldened by hagiographic histories of Lee and his lieutenants, the Sons (and daughters) of the South have convinced themselves, and many others, of something that never was.

"To most soldiers in the Confederate Army, the war was not about slavery," writes a gentleman from Beltsville, Md., named Lawrence Ink in a recent letter to the editor of The Washington Post. "It was about patriotism for one's state. Most Confederate soldiers did not own slaves and were not fighting to protect slavery. ... Nor did President Abraham Lincoln initially view the war as about slavery. His objective was to preserve the union. Those who claim the war was only about slavery need to read some history."

Well, I've read a good deal of American history, and written some as well, and my belief is that it's important to confront this view forcefully because the claim that this conflict was not about slavery is wrong, deeply wrong, no matter how sincerely those who adhere to it may feel – or how bravely the rebels acquitted themselves in battle. Grant himself felt that he could separate his feelings of the Southern soldiers, including Lee, from the perverted institution that induced them to take up arms against their own nation.

"I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly," he wrote, "and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse."

And what exactly was that cause?

The answer is not to be found in any of the Douglas Southall Freeman's three-volume histories of Lee and his men or in Martha Mitchell's nostalgic recreation of the Old South. It can be found other places, however, if one looks a little deeper. University of Kentucky historian William W. Freehling called the decades' long argument over slavery in the U.S. Congress in the 1830s and 1840s the "Pearl Harbor" of the Civil War. In a brilliant book called "Arguing About Slavery," scholar William Lee Miller notes that what made this chapter in American history so compelling is precisely that there were no bombs as at Pearl Harbor. There were words many hundreds of thousands of them that, in the end, couldn't forestall the shells fired on Fort Sumter.

It was not a coincidence that the Civil War broke out there, in South Carolina. That state had always been been home to a special breed of Southern politician, men like Rep. James Henry Hammond, who said this on the House floor in an 1836 speech sarcastically castigating those who would confer freedom, or even common humanity, on blacks:

"Are we prepared to see them mingling in our Legislatures? Is any portion of this country prepared to see them enter these halls and take their seats by our sides, in perfect equality with the white representatives of an Anglo Saxon race ... to see them placed at the heads of your Departments; or to see, perhaps, some 'Othello' or 'Toussaint' or 'Boyer' gifted with genius and inspired by ambition grasp the presidential wreath, and wield the destinies of this great Republic? From such a picture I turn with irrepressible disgust."

Well, it took 172 years, but an African-American with a name a lot more exotic than Othello or Toussaint did indeed become president of these United States. And it was particularly tin-eared, historically speaking, for a member of that self-same South Carolina delegation to hector Barack Obama at last year's State of the Union address. In truth, James Henry Hammond's racist diatribe was milder than those by other Southern "statesmen" who stirred hate and fear among their countrymen in the days leading up to the Civil War.

Jefferson Davis, in a speech to the Confederate Congress in April 1861, extolled slavery as a benevolent invention that allowed a "superior race" to transform "brutal savages into docile, intelligent, and civilized agricultural laborers." Alexander H. Stephens, Jefferson Davis' vice president, proclaimed that Jefferson and the Founders' high-minded declarations of universal liberty were "in violation of the laws of nature." This was profoundly wrong, Stephens said.

"Our new government is founded on exactly the opposite idea," thundered the vice president of the Confederacy. "Its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests upon the great truth that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition."

This was the kind of thing said by a group of now-forgotten men called "secession commissioners." They were dispatched in 1860 from South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi and Alabama to other state capitals in the South urging state legislatures to prepare for secession. These men outlined a bloody apocalyptic scenario of black rebellion and the attendant slaughter of whites – with frequent allusions to mass rape and throat-slitting. They invariably mentioned Haiti as the relevant example, and stated flatly that this is what Lincoln wished on the South.

"The [Haitian] Negro ... arose with all the fury of the beast, and scenes were then enacted over a comparatively few planters, that the white fiends [of the North] would delight to see re-enacted now with us," Andrew Pickens Calhoun – son of John C. Calhoun – said in Columbia, S.C.

"Our deliverance from this great danger, in my opinion, is to be found in the reserved right of the states to withdraw from injury and oppression." So said Gov. John J. Pettus of Mississippi in his own capital on Nov. 26, 1860. The "injury" he alluded to was the election of Abraham Lincoln as president. The "oppression" was Lincoln's avowed opposition to the expansion of slavery to any new states – a stance that was the organizing principle of the newly formed Republican Party.

In Pettus' speech that day, Lincoln's as-yet-unformed administration was referred to as "Black Republican rule." That phrase "Lincoln and the Black Republicans" was mentioned a thousand times by Southern politicians, and quoted faithfully in the Southern press. It is a reminder that the key issue in the 1860 campaign was slavery, that Southerners were openly discussing withdrawing from the Union before Election Day, and that secession was accomplished before Lincoln arrived in Washington. Indeed, Jefferson Davis was inaugurated as president of the Confederacy before Lincoln took office himself. And all of this was brought about by the South's fears that slavery's days were numbered.

Secession, Pettus insisted, was the only way of escaping "Black Republican politics and free Negro morals," something he assured his fellow Mississippians that would turn Mississippi into "a cesspool of vice, crime and infamy."

Over in Charleston, the General Assembly authorized a convention in Columbia when word reached the capital of Lincoln's victory. Even before it took place, both U.S. senators resigned their seats in Congress and the Legislature appropriated money to equip an army of 10,000 men. John Archer Elmore, a native South Carolinian then practicing law in Montgomery, was dispatched as Alabama's secession commissioner. Lincoln's election, he told the delegates, was "an avowed declaration of war upon the institutions, the rights, and the interests of the South."

The sole institution he alluded to, of course, was slavery. Occasionally secession commissioners would mention "states' rights." But the only imperiled "right" they ever got around to mentioning was the custom of holding other human beings in bondage. There was nothing subtle about this, nothing genteel or evocative of "Gone with the Wind" in the contemporaneous appeals. Lincoln was routinely drawn in Southern newspapers with ape-like features, bent on the destruction of the South and even the white race itself.

"Our fathers made this a government for the white man, rejecting the Negro as an ignorant, inferior barbarian race incapable of self-government, and not therefore, entitled to be associated with the white man upon terms of civil, political or social equality," Mississippi secession commissioner William L. Harris told Georgia's Legislature. Lincoln, he said, was committed on a course "to overturn and strike down this great feature of our Union."

These accounts, and many others, are contained in a thin paperback volume of only 103 pages called "Apostles of Disunion." It was written by Charles B. Dew, a son of the South whose ancestors on both sides fought for the Confederacy. At age 14, Dew's father Jack – named for Stonewall Jackson – presented him with a .22-caliber rifle and the "Lee's Lieutenants" trilogy. Charles Dew grew up and became a professor of history at Williams College. His groundbreaking 2001 book was published by the University of Virginia Press, and in its opening chapter Professor Dew takes note of the 1998 flap over "Confederate History Month" then roiling Richmond under Gov. James Gilmore.

Using the words uttered by the South's secession commissioners and its elected leaders themselves, Dew debunks the myths he learned as a boy. Among those he quotes are William L. Harris, who had turned down an offer from President James Buchanan to serve on the Supreme Court. A native Georgian who was well known as an orator and debater, Harris ended his 1860 speech to Atlanta's secession convention with this florid oratorical flourish:

"Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish – the part of Mississippi is chosen. She will never submit to the principles and policies of this Black Republican administration. She had rather see the last of her race, men, women and children, immolated in one common funeral pyre than see them subjected to the degradation of civil, political and social equality with the Negro race."

That was the true face of the "Lost Cause." It's a hard one to credit. Yes, most men in the Confederate army did not own slaves. Many believed they were fighting for their honor, and out of love of their native states. Some, like Robert E. Lee, did so reluctantly. But that doesn't change either the nature of the rebel government under whose banner they marched, or the depraved institution that the Confederate government had been formed to perpetuate.

This was posted on the History News Network. The full letter, along with signers, is reprinted below. If you like a laugh, check out the comments section on the HNN site. Apparently the neo-confederates are a little pissed. Good.

5-19-09

Dear President Obama: Please Don't Honor the Arlington Confederate Monument
http://hnn.us/articles/85884.html

By Edward Sebesta and James Loewen

This letter was written by Edward Sebesta and James Loewen and signed by the scholars listed below.

May 18, 2009

President Barack H. Obama
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear President Obama:

Since the administration of Woodrow Wilson, presidents have sent annually a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument. Prior to the administration of George H. W. Bush, this was done on or near the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Starting with George H.W. Bush, it has been done on Memorial Day.

We ask you to not send a wreath or some other commemorative token to the Arlington Confederate Monument during your administration or after.

There are several reasons as to why this monument, a product of the Nadir in American race relations, should not be honored, and we list and explain them in this letter.

The monument was intended to legitimize secession and the principles of the Confederacy and glorify the Confederacy. It isn’t just a remembrance of the dead. The speeches at its ground-breaking and dedication defended and held up as glorious the Confederacy and the ideas behind it and stated that the monument was to these ideals as well as the dead. It was also intended as a symbol of white nationalism, portrayed in opposition to the multiracial democracy of Reconstruction, and a celebration of the re-establishment of white supremacy in the former slave states by former Confederate soldiers. In its design it also tells wrong history, boasting fourteen shields with the coat of arms of fourteen states. Thus it claims that Missouri, Kentucky, and Maryland were part of the Confederacy. They weren’t.

The monument was given to the Federal Government by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC), which raised the funds to erect it. The UDC’s reasons for the monument are instructive. In the address of Mrs. Daisy McLaurin Stevens, President General of the United Daughters of the Confederacy at its dedication, she makes clear that the monument is to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy:

Great ideas and righteous ideas are alone immortal. The eternal years of God are theirs. The ideas our heroes cherished were and are beneficial as they are everlasting. These were living then; they are living to-day and shall live to-morrow and work the betterment of mankind. Thus our heroes are of those who, though dead, still toil for man through the arms and brains of those their examples have inspired and quickened to nobler things.

Since the United Daughters of the Confederacy upheld in multiple publications in the early 20th Century that the Ku Klux Klan was the heroic effort of the Confederate soldier, we have an idea what the “noble past” and “ideas our heroes cherished” were. Of course one of these “ideas” was secession to preserve the institution of African slavery.

Likewise General Bennett H. Young, Commander-in-Chief of the United Confederate Veterans also defends the cause of the Confederate soldier, the neo-Confederate cause of their descendants, and defends secession in his speech as follows:

At this hour I represent the survivors of the Southern army. Though this Confederate monument is erected on Federal ground, which makes it unusual and remarkable, yet the men from whom I hold commission would only have me come without apologies or regrets from the past. Those for whom I speak gave the best they had to their land and country. They spared no sacrifice and no privation to win for the Southland national independence.

I am sure I shall not offend the proprieties of either the hour of the occasion when I say that we still glory in the records of our beloved and immortal dead. The dead for whom this monument stands sponsor died for what they believed to be right. Their surviving comrades and their children still believe that that for which they suffered and laid down their lives was just; that their premises in the Civil War were according to our Constitution….

The sword said the South was wrong, but the sword is not necessarily guided by conscience or reason. The power of numbers and the longest guns cannot destroy principle nor obliterate truth. Right lives forever, it survives battles, failures, conflicts, and death. There is no human power, however mighty, that can in the end annihilate truth.

In fact, most white Southerners in 1914 agreed that both slavery and secession were wrong. Not Young. No apologies. No regrets -- despite the historical record of Confederate soldiers having committed racial atrocities of massacring surrendered African American soldiers on at least eight occasions.

Hilary A. Herbert, Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Arlington Confederate Monument Association, makes it clear that the monument stands for the legitimacy of secession, in opposition to Reconstruction, and for white supremacy. In his History of The Arlington Confederate Monument at Arlington, Virginia, he writes:

In 1867 the seceding States were subjected to the horrors of Congressional Reconstruction, but in a few years American manhood had triumphed; Anglo-Saxon civilization had been saved; local self-government under the Constitution had been restored; ex-Confederates were serving the National Government, and true patriots, North and South, were addressing themselves to the noble task of restoring fraternal feeling between the sections.

Within a generation after Congressional Reconstruction, American historians condemned it …. as “a crime against civilization,” and public opinion seems to have approved the verdict.

Herbert goes on to refer to the Confederate soldiers who joined the Ku Klux Klan and Red Shirts as being heroes for restoring white supremacy and overthrowing Reconstruction, referring to “the soldiers who fought the battles of the Confederacy and … by their courage and devotion during the two decades after the war, were saviors of Anglo-Saxon civilization in their section.”

The monument itself has a Latin motto, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” It translates, “The winning cause pleased the Gods, but the losing cause pleased Cato.” This is a classical reference which to the cognoscenti implies that Lincoln was a despot and the Union cause unjust; Cato, the stoic believer in “freedom,” would have sided with the Confederacy.

The Arlington Confederate Monument is a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes. This implies that the humanity of Africans and African Americans is of no significance.

Today, the monument gives encouragement to the modern neo-Confederate movement and provides a rallying point for them. The modern neo-Confederate movement interprets it as vindicating the Confederacy and the principles and ideas of the Confederacy and their neo-Confederate ideas. The presidential wreath enhances the prestige of these neo-Confederate events.

Fr. Alister C. Anderson, as Chaplain-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), at the 85th anniversary of the dedication of the Arlington Confederate Monument in 1999, gave a lengthy speech explaining its meaning. His understanding of the Arlington Confederate Monument can be said to be fairly representative of modern neo-Confederate opinion.

Anderson believes that the Civil War was a holy war between an orthodox Christian nation (the South), a view widespread in the neo-Confederate movement, and what he feels was an un-Christian and heretical North, as he explained in a series of articles in the Confederate Veteran as Chaplain-in-Chief of the SCV. This explains some of the passages of his speech at the Arlington Confederate Monument. In his speech Anderson explains regarding the monument:

… It reveals and concentrates in beautiful, rugged bronze nearly every idea that a true Southern historian, theologian, statesman, and patriotic citizen could present about the religion, culture, morals, economics, and politics of a civilization from out of which the Confederate States of America evolved. The monument captures the ideals and accomplishments that still existed at the end of the War for Southern Independence. Thank God it does not depict the beginning of the Reconstruction Era, the most disgusting and destructive period in United States history from which the South has never really recovered.

Anderson goes on to note Washington’s presence in bronze:

It depicts George Washington on horseback with the Latin inscription DEO VINDICE, which means, “God Vindicates.” Southerners believed under the Constitution they had the right to secede if they were being harmed by a tyrannical government.

To Anderson, as to other neo-Confederates today, the Arlington Monument exists to glorify the ideas of the Confederacy, which he sees as the ideas of the neo-Confederacy.

Anderson goes on to explain, correctly, the meaning of the main inscription on the monument, “Victrix causea Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni.” This is a line from a poem Pharasalia by the Roman poet Lucan, used to represent Lincoln as a tyrant and the North as tyrannical. Fr. Anderson explains:

Victix causa, “the winning cause (or side)”, referring to Julius Caesar’s inordinate ambition and his lust for total power and control, is compared with President Lincoln and the Federal Government’s desire and power to crush and destroy the South. Next we read diis placuit which translates “pleased the gods.” In this context, gods are with a small “g” and refer to the gods of mythology; the gods of money, power, war and domination, greed, hate, lust and ambition. Next we come to the noble climax of this quotation, sed victa cantoni which translates “but the losing side (or cause) pleased Cato”. Here Lucan, the poet, refers to Pompey’s fight to retain the old conservative, traditional republican government of Rome. Even though Pompey was defeated by Caesar’s greater military power, his defeat, nevertheless, pleased the noble Cato. And here, of course, Cato represents the noble aims of the Southern Confederacy. The South fought politically to maintain the Constitution which had guided her safely for eighty-seven years. She merely wanted to be left alone and governed by it. The aggression-minded totalitarian Northern government would not permit that and so she pleased the gods of abolitionism, transcendentalism, utopianism, state centralism, universalism, rationalism and a host of other “isms.”

Anderson here denounces abolition, the anti-slavery movement that ultimately led the United States of America out of the moral evil of slavery, as an evil itself.

Sending a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Memorial Monument enhances the prestige of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, an organization with a long history of racism from praising the Ku Klux Klan in the early part of the 20th century, to publishing articles against the Civil Rights movement in the Civil Rights Era, to promoting neo-Confederacy today. When the president of the United States of America enhances the prestige of this monument and of the United Daughters of the Confederacy, he strengthens a group working to set back America’s progress in race relations.

Finally, in 2009, the main speaker for the annual observance at the Arlington Confederate Memorial is Ron Maxwell, director of the movie “Gods and Generals,” whose neo-Confederate meaning he made clear in an interview in Southern Partisan. He also has written expressing his fear of Hispanic immigration leading to civil war in the notoriously racist Chronicles magazine, the organ of the ultra-right Rockford Foundation.

For the president of the United States of America to send a wreath to the monument this year would contribute to providing Ron Maxwell with a more prestigious setting for his speech. It would aid and abet the ongoing use of presidential prestige and this monument for their neo-Confederate agenda.

We ask you to break this chain of racism stretching back to Woodrow Wilson, and not send a wreath or other token of esteem to the Arlington Confederate Monument. This monument should not be elevated in prestige above other monuments by a presidential wreath.

Sincerely yours,

Last Name	First Name	Institution	Biographical Information (for identification purposes only)
Alexander	Shawn Leigh	Langston Hughes Center, Kansas University	Assistant Professor African and African American Studies, Interim Director, Langston Hughes Center
Attie	Jeanie	Long Island University	Associate Professor of History
Ayers	Bill	University of Illinois, Chicago	Professor of Education
Barber	David	University of Tennessee, Martin	Assistant Professor of History
Blakely	Allison	Boston University	Professor of European and Comparative History; George and Joyce Wein Professor of African American Studies.
Bridges	Roger D.	Rutherford .B. Hayes Presidential Center	Executive Director Emeritus
Brown	Joshua	The City University of New York	Executive Director American Social History Project/ Center for Media and Learning, Professor of History, Ph.D. Program in History, The Graduate Center.
Burton	Orville Vernon	Coastal Carolina University	Burroughs Distinguished Professor of Southern History and Culture at Coastal Carolina University. Formerly he was Director of the Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (ICHASS) at the University of Illinois, where he is Professor of History, African American Studies, and Sociology. He is also a Senior Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA), where he is Associate Director of Humanities and Social Sciences. In addition, he is Executive Director of the College of Charleston’s Program in the Carolina Lowcountry and Atlantic World.
Christie	Thomas	Lincoln Public Schools, Lincoln, Nebraska	Multicultural Administrator
Davis	Simone	Mt. Holyoke College	Professor of English
Ewert	George		Former Director of the Museum of Mobile
Farley	Jonathan	Institute fur Algebra Johannes Kepler Universitat Linz	Teaching and Research Fellow
Fellman	Gordon	Brandeis University	Professor of Sociology
Fink	Leon	University of Illinois, Chicago	Distinguished Professor. Director of WRGUW (Graduate Concentration in the History of Work, Race, and Gender in the Urban World) Department of History
Finkelman	Paul	Albany Law School	President William McKinley Distinguished Professor of Law
Gundaker	Grey	College of William & Mary	Professor of Anthropology
Hague	Euan	DePaul University, Chicago	Professor of Cultural Geography, editor of "Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction."
Hayes-Bautista	David E	School of Medicine, UCLA	Author of numerous articles on Calfornia Hispanic history
Hicks	David	Virginia Tech	Associate Professor of History and Social Science Education
Jackson	Kenneth T.	Columbia University, NYC	Professor of History and Social Sciences
Jennings	Matt H.	Macon State College	Student
Katznelson	Ira	Columbia University, NYC	Ruggles Professor of Political Science and History
Kennedy	Roger G.	National Museum of American History (ret.), National Park Service (ret.)	Director Emeritus, National Museum of American History, Former Director, National Park Service
Key	Barclay	Western Illinois University	Assistant Professor of African-American History
Key	DeWayne	Mars Hill Bible School, Florence, Alabama
Knapp	Peter	Villanova University	Professor of Sociology
Leib	Jonathan	Old Dominion University	Associate Professor of Geography
Loewen	James	Univ. of Vermont	Professor Emeritus of Sociology, Univ. of Vermont; author of "Lies My Teacher Told Me," "Lies Across America," "Sundown Towns," etc.
Love	David, A.	Commentator	Columnist at www.blackcommentator.com
McPherson	James	Princeton University	Professor of History
Miller	Willaim Lee	Univ. of Virginia
Mitchell	Don	Syracuse University	Professor of Geography
Mizell	Linda	University of Colorado at Boulder	Assistant Professor, School of Education
Murray	Paul	Siena College	Professor of Sociology
Nieto	Sonia	University of Massachusetts at Amherst	Professor Emerita, Language, Literary, and Culture
Owens	Deirdre Cooper	University of Mississippi	Assistant Professor of History
Parenti	Michael		On advisory boards of Independent Progressive Politics Network, Education Without Borders, the Jasenovic Foundation, New Political Science, and Nature, Society and Thought. Author of many books in political science.
Phillips	Michael	Collin College, Plano, Texas	History Professor, Author of "White Metropolis"
Roisman	Florence W.	Indiana University School of Law	William F. Harvey Professor of Law
Schmeeckle	Maria	Illinois State University	Associate Professor of Sociology
Sebesta	Edward H.	Independent researcher.	Editor of "Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction," University of Texas Press.
Shabazz	Amilcar	University of Massachusetts at Amherst	Professor and Chair of the W.E.B. DuBois Department of Afro-American Studies
Sinha	Manisha	University of Massachusetts at Amherst	Associate Professor of Afro-American Studies and History
Sleeter	Christine	California State University Monterey Bay	Professor Emerita, College of Professional Studies
Sowa	Maureen	Bristol Community College	Professor of History
Webster	Gerald Raymond	University of Wyoming	Chair, Department of Geography
White	George, Jr.	York College, CUNY	Assistant Professor of History
Wiener	Jon	University of California, Irvine; The Nation Magazine	Contributing Editor at "The Nation"; Professor of History at UC-Irvine.