Black Descendants of the Confederates

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/opinion/letters/confederacy-black-descendants.html

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To the Editor:

Re “My Body Is a Confederate Monument,” by Caroline Randall Williams (Sunday Review, June 28), about being “the descendant of black women who were domestic servants and white men who raped their help”:

Ms. Williams has written about the most powerful and most personal reason to tear down statues of Confederate generals and to rename U.S. military bases currently bearing Confederate military names. People can see many reasons to eliminate the glorifying of people who were traitors fighting to retain the ugliness of slavery, but Ms. Williams has written her truth.

Her very DNA is a monument to the debasement and cruelty of slavery. We have learned about trauma descending through subsequent generations; Caroline Randall Williams is living with that trauma, front and center.

I can feel her rage in this piece, righteous and true.

Prudence W. BartonNew Hamburg, N.Y.

To the Editor:

I just read Caroline Randall Williams’s opinion piece and can hardly breathe.

My family left Alabama in droves when “issues” developed between our black ancestors and the white family whose men repeatedly raped our black and mixed-race females. Her piece made me recall my maternal great-grandfather’s distaste for anyone looking him in the eyes because of his hatred of the blue eyes given to him by his mother’s rapist.

It boggles my mind how white people, especially those in the South, can walk around every day seeing the body evidence that Ms. Williams and so many others present without experiencing some modicum of shame and heartbreak for what was done to and extracted from black lives on this land.

Ms. Williams’s message should be read and understood by every Confederate monument preservationist. We can only hope for honest reflection.

Shari HamiltonSan Leandro, Calif.

To the Editor:

Caroline Randall Williams touches a sensitive historical nerve with a blistering and elegantly written essay. She lays bare the Old South’s moral corruption, a period when slaves were assaulted, sexually and otherwise, with unquestioned social and legal immunity. Southern leaders were traitors to the goodness and morality they professed each Sunday.

In the years directly before and during the Civil War, this same Southern leadership again turned traitors, forming a great army to defeat the United States, a country to which they had once sworn their allegiance and one that had served them so well under a Constitution they had helped create.

Ms. Williams is right. These monuments have been up far too long, and they spin a false narrative. So bring down the monuments to traitors of both morality and the United States of America. Bring them all down and pile them up in a place where the ground was stained with the blood of young U.S. soldiers killed by an enemy within their own borders. Let them become a memorial to these soldiers’ heroic and supreme sacrifice.

Douglas HillElkton, Md.

To the Editor:

How does one read this essay and not begin to understand the impact of slavery and its savage and bloodthirsty legacy of racism, police brutality and white supremacy? On the same day that it appeared in the Sunday Review the president of the United States retweeted one of his supporters yelling “white power.” This piece should be required reading in every school in America.

Josh GrumetShrub Oak, N.Y.