I was 11 years old when the Civil War Centennial started in 1961. With some notable exceptions, it was a 4 year long carnival of Lost Cause propaganda, with an almost Disneyesque presentation of the Confederacy.
I remember thinking even then that there was something very wrong with this. Weren’t these people shooting at the same flag (minus a few stars) to which we pledged allegiance every morning? Weren’t they fighting to keep their slaves? Some of the adults I knew (though not my parents) tried to tell me that it was really about tariffs or states rights or something. That was transparent bullshit even to a child. If the south had won, they would have kept slavery, they said so over and over and Jim Crow proved that they had meant it.
It has taken almost 60 years, but the chickens have come home to roost. That great national exercise in cognitive dissonance, honoring the Confederacy, is finally coming to an end.