Nobel Prize-winning American novelist William Faulkner observed, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” Faulkner was born in Mississippi where the Confederate emblem is embedded in the state flag.
In 2015, Bree Newsome climbed a flagpole in front of the South Carolina capitol and took down the Confederate flag.
Fast forward two years, HBO is planning a new series, Confederate, an alternate-history in which the South won the Civil War. Truth be told, the story of the “Lost Cause” is far from past. It is told in Confederate monuments from Maryland to Texas and the “Black Codes” enacted at the end of Reconstruction.
In a Washington Post op-ed, Newsome wrote:
The roots of mass incarceration in the 21st century trace directly to the period immediately after the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves. Between 1865 and 1866, Southern states passed a series of laws known as the “Black Codes” designed to grant local authorities power to arrest black people for virtually any reason at all and force them to provide free labor via convict leasing programs. Some of the most notorious prisons in the South would be built soon after: Parchman in Mississippi, built to house black male prisoners, where Rep. John Lewis would later be held during the Freedom Rides in 1961; and Angola Prison in Louisiana, erected on the site of a former plantation, purchased with profits from a slave-trading firm. Angola remains the largest maximum-security prison in the country and is notorious for its extremely high prisoner death rates.
Newsome added:
Given that the true cause of the Confederacy was slavery, did the Confederacy really lose altogether? Confederates were only out of power for roughly 12 years during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877). Campaigns of terror led by groups such as the KKK were overwhelmingly successful, and despite a brief period of gain for African Americans during which time seven African Americans from the South were elected to the U.S. Congress, by the beginning of the 20th century, white supremacists in the South had succeeded in returning blacks to a condition as close to slavery as possible, and many of those abuses endure today.
[…]
Imagining a world where the Confederacy won, where the legacy of slavery is fresh and the terror of it ever-present may seem like fantasy for white creatives, but ask most black people living in the United States today. They’ll tell you it’s their reality.
With his white privilege on full display, HBO President of Programming Casey Bloys asked critics to withhold judgment:
My hope is people will judge the actual material instead of what it could be or should be or might be. We'll rise or fall based on that material.
What is there to judge? The ancestors' humanity?
The backlash has begun (and here).
For updates, follow @NoConfederate on Twitter.
