SCV Plans to Celebrate Racist Confederate Government
The American Civil War was the costliest, most devastating conflict in the history of our country. At least 620,000 soldiers died, as did some 400,000 civilians who fell to disease, suicide, murder and similar causes. Hundreds of thousands of others suffered horrible wood-saw amputations and terrible wounds. In the four years the war lasted, it cost $2.5 million daily — an incredible amount at the time. In the end, the South was laid waste, its industries, its grand homes, its roads and its farms largely destroyed. It would be a century before the region fully recovered.
Yes, it was a splendid little war — that is, if you believe the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Southern heritage society that in the last decade has seen a large number of racial extremists in influential and sometimes top positions.
“CELEBRATE THE BEGINNING OF THE CONFEDERACY IN MONTGOMERY, ALABAMA,” the SCV wrote its members in a breathless announcement on its E-mail list Monday. The event, scheduled for Feb. 19, 2011, will feature a parade up Dexter Avenue to the Alabama State Capitol — the end of the very same route taken by Martin Luther King Jr. and thousands of others who participated in the Selma-to-Montgomery voting rights march in 1963. It is to be followed by other events around the South commemorating the sesquicentennial of each year of what some Southerners still call the War of Northern Aggression.