Friday, January 19th, 2007...7:12 am
Something I’ve Been Meaning to Write About
Many of you have probaly read about Virginia Delegate Frank D. Hargrove Sr., who told an African American who was supporting a resolution apologizing for slavery to “get over it.”
I hear this sort of thing from many white southerners when people bring up the past. In one of Ed Bradley’s final stories, he travelled to Mississippi to talk about the reopening of the Emmett Till case. Over and over again, he encountered whites who kept saying, “That’s the past, and there is no need to open up old wounds.”
Okay, I can see where people would get frustrated when they keep hearing about issues that seem to have been settled years or even generations ago. I understand the desire to move on. But, I’d be more willing to entertain pleas from white southerners that their black neighbors move on, if they themselves had moved on.
Take a look at Hargrove’s own state. Up until 1997, the state song was “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” a song where the narrator, a newly freed slave, is nostalgic for his days of bondage. The move by the legislature to ditch the song (Hargrove himself was there at the time; I don’t know how he voted) is still controversial today. You can’t have a candidate debate, particularly in a Republican primary, without a question about the display of the Confederate battle emblem. Former Governor and Senator George Allen felt the need to surround himself with all sorts of Confederate nostalgia as if his great-grandaddy fought at Antietam, despite the fact that his father was from Union state Michigan and Allen grew up in California.
Southern blacks watch as symbols of the segregationist and even slave past of their region are innocently celebrated as “heritage” on a regular basis. Not that I am in any position to make deals on the part of the African-American community, but I’d bet that they will “get over” their past as soon as a majority of the Southern white community gets over theirs.
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