I am half way through a memoir by a Professor Emeritus of History from West Point. It is, in part, a memoir of stunned recognition of the racist past of towns he grew up in,  Alexandria, VA and Monroe, GA, a past whitewashed from the history books and public monuments in Monroe, once known as “Lynchtown.” Almost halfway through his confessional, he writes:

At the time I graduated from high school in 1980, I knew nothing about Monroe’s and Walton County’s racial past. No one ever talked about it. As late as 2000, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that Monroe’s veil of silence remained. (Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with thew Myth of the Lost Cause, 103)

This after recounting for thirty pages the horrors of the post-Reconstruction history of his “adopted hometown:” Black men and women shot in the face point-blank, Black men beaten and left to die, Black men lynched and lofted to high visibility, photographed corpses converted to postcards and mailed across the country; Black men dragged from jails and from railroad cars on their way to trial or execution, and so on. Then white juries refusing to convict avowed lynchers, citizens of Monroe keeping enforced silence, mainline churches voting to exclude Blacks applying to join,  countless crowd harassments and assaults on protest marches and organized voter registration and so on. This documented racial history of Walton County, GA never made the history books of the twentieth century.

I haven’t even reached the fourth chapter about his college years: “My College: the Shrine of the Lost Cause.”

Already the message of the book tolls alarmingly: we have buried the atrocities of our racial past. The front of the book shows a stately monument of Robert E. Lee on horseback with the Confederate flag on a pole in the background. In 2018 the author  returned to Monroe, searching for some monument depicting the racial atrocities of the past.  In the downtown he saw a large 1906 Confederate monument, but nothing to recognize any of the lynchings in the town nicknamed “Lynchtown.” Then he drove out east on the Old Athens highway:

Next to a small road turnoff, I saw a plaque. I pulled over and stepped out of my rental car, right into some red clay. Yes, I was back in Georgia. Staring me in the face was a highway marker for the Moore’s Ford lynching. The marker served as a modest marker to a ghastly crime [described earlier in some detail]. Not at all like the monumental obelisk honoring the Confederate veterans in front of the Monroe courthouse.

I read the Monroe’s Ford lynching marker, near to tears. I felt the emotions of finally seeing a part of the truth revealed in Monroe, but I also felt angry that I had grown up surrounded by the trappings of white supremacy, and I hadn’t even realized it [104].

This is the resonant theme of this book: our public records, monuments, and textbooks have whitewashed the racial atrocities of our past, as recent as the Moore’s Ford 1946 lynching of four Black citizens.  What we don’t want to remember, we cover up, leaving subsequent generations in ignorance. We remember the Lost Cause of the Civil War with handsome and conspicuous monuments, but we ignore the crimes of White supremacy, as recent as the 1982 Klan attack on protest marchers in Walton County.

White people are not inclined to remember the racial offenses of the past two centuries, because they stain the myth of supremacy. We are so eager for bygones to be bygones, because they contradict American exceptionalism and the movement to “Make America great again.”

I am half way through a memoir by a Professor Emeritus of History from West Point. It is, in part, a memoir of stunned recognition of the racist past of towns he grew up in,  Alexandria, VA and Monroe, GA, a past whitewashed from the history books and public monuments in Monroe, once known as “Lynchtown.” Almost halfway through his confessional, he writes:

At the time I graduated from high school in 1980, I knew nothing about Monroe’s and Walton County’s racial past. No one ever talked about it. As late as 2000, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation reported that Monroe’s veil of silence remained. (Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner’s Reckoning with thew Myth of the Lost Cause, 103)

This after recounting for thirty pages the horrors of the post-Reconstruction history of his “adopted hometown:” Black men and women shot in the face point-blank, Black men beaten and left to die, Black men lynched and lofted to high visibility, photographed corpses converted to postcards and mailed across the country; Black men dragged from jails and from railroad cars on their way to trial or execution, and so on. Then white juries refusing to convict avowed lynchers, citizens of Monroe keeping enforced silence, mainline churches voting to exclude Blacks applying to join,  countless crowd harassments and assaults on protest marches and organized voter registration and so on. This documented racial history of Walton County, GA never made the history books of the twentieth century.

I haven’t even reached the fourth chapter about his college years: “My College: the Shrine of the Lost Cause.”

Already the message of the book tolls alarmingly: we have buried the atrocities of our racial past. The front of the book shows a stately monument of Robert E. Lee on horseback with the Confederate flag on a pole in the background. In 2018 the author  returned to Monroe, searching for some monument depicting the racial atrocities of the past.  In the downtown he saw a large 1906 Confederate monument, but nothing to recognize any of the lynchings in the town nicknamed “Lynchtown.” Then he drove out east on the Old Athens highway:

Next to a small road turnoff, I saw a plaque. I pulled over and stepped out of my rental car, right into some red clay. Yes, I was back in Georgia. Staring me in the face was a highway marker for the Moore’s Ford lynching. The marker served as a modest marker to a ghastly crime [described earlier in some detail]. Not at all like the monumental obelisk honoring the Confederate veterans in front of the Monroe courthouse.

I read the Monroe’s Ford lynching marker, near to tears. I felt the emotions of finally seeing a part of the truth revealed in Monroe, but I also felt angry that I had grown up surrounded by the trappings of white supremacy, and I hadn’t even realized it [104].

This is the resonant theme of this book: our public records, monuments, and textbooks have whitewashed the racial atrocities of our past, as recent as the Moore’s Ford 1946 lynching of four Black citizens.  What we don’t want to remember, we cover up, leaving subsequent generations in ignorance. We remember the Lost Cause of the Civil War with handsome and conspicuous monuments, but we ignore the crimes of White supremacy, as recent as the 1982 Klan attack on protest marchers in Walton County.

White people are not inclined to remember the racial offenses of the past two centuries, because they stain the myth of supremacy. We are so eager for bygones to be bygones, because they contradict American exceptionalism and the movement to “Make America great again.”