*On The 150th Anniversary of South Carolina’s Secession Jubilee- Send In The Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Infantry Regiment- Again

Click on the headline to link to an Associated Press online article about the preparations for "celebration" of the 150th anniversary of secession.

Markin comment:

No question that on most occasions the victors in war, like everything else, get to write the narrative of that victory. The exceptions, however, in some cases prove the rule. In this case the exception is the very, very checkered bourgeois historical interpretation of the American Civil War. In the immediate aftermath of the Union victories the narrative ran something like Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy in the war itself. In the aftermath of the defeat of Reconstruction, especially it more radical phases in the late 1860’s and early 1870s though, and for an absurdly long time afterward the South, and Southern historians (like those of the U.B. Phillips school), chipped away at that clear-cut victory for union and abolition of slavery. The black-led Civil Rights movement of the 1950's and early 1960s, as a by-product, produced some much needed historical correctives to that distorted Jim Crow narrative.

Know this, however, there always has been, and is, an undertow reaction to their fate in the Civil War by many descendants on the Southern side of that war. From the more recent controversies over the using the Confederate flag as all, or part, of various state flags (South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, etc.) to the place of various generals, like Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, in American military history the conflict has never died for them, or for us. For the pro-unionist, pro-abolitionist side there has been a certain laxness in appreciation that for many down there (yes, down there) the Civil War never ended. And for once they are right, it hasn’t. Those social and economic tasks around the race question, around the black question as those of us on the left have termed it, from education to housing to jobs still confront us.

Now comes word that South Carolina, the heart and brains of the Confederacy, has planned a celebration, a jubilee if you will, around the 150th anniversary of the signing of the articles of secession by their forbears in December 1860. Every red-blooded leftist, every ardent slavery abolitionist, every admirer of Captain John Brown of Harpers Ferry should burn with rage over this affront to history and protest this event as the NAACP has called to do.

Except, unlike the NAACP, an organization that has historically seen only the need for some “tweaking” of the American capitalist system to bring justice we cry out- Finish The Civil War!. Come to think of it, in addition to that slogan, we should also call for the heroic Massachusetts 54th Black Volunteer Infantry Regiment, or its righteous political descendants, to go down to Charleston and straighten these fools out- again. And, like in 1865, do it while singing John Brown’s Body through the streets of Charleston.