Tag: Civil War

New essay by Ellen Morris Prewitt

Photo Credit: Ellen Morris Prewitt

On December 7, 2024, I shared Ellen Morris Prewitt’s essay about the 150th anniversary of the Vicksburg Massacres.

Ellen is the granddaughter of the main instigator of the Massacres and has been sharing her experiences as she has researched her family’s involvement and grappled with the continuing legacy of racism.

Now, Ellen has a powerful essay entitled “Granddaughter of The Instigator” in the Juneteenth special edition of Salvation South, which delves further into her witness to the legacy of the Vicksburg Massacres on a community and personal level. This essay is an excerpt from her memoir-in-progress, Loving My Hateful Ancestors. You can read a post about the publication of the essay in Ellen’s Very Southern Voice blog and, while you’re there, subscribe to her newsletter and/or follow her blog.

I just realized that I keep referring to Ellen Morris Prewitt by her first name, as though we were acquainted in real life, but we only met each other through blogging. Her writing is so vivid and heartfelt, though, that I feel as if we know each other through our posts and our comments on each other’s blogs with a side of occasional personal emails.

I’m a fan of Ellen’s and invite you to join me!

150th anniversary of the Vicksburg Massacres

(Photo by Justin Wilkens on Unsplash – Yazoo River at Vicksburg during 2019 flood)

Today, December 7, 2024, marks the sesquicentennial of the beginning of the Vicksburg, Mississippi Massacres during the Reconstruction period following the United States Civil War.

I grant you that I would not know this were it not for Ellen Morris Prewitt, an author and fellow blogger, who has been researching this in relation to her own family history.

You can read about it all in this guest opinion piece in the Mississippi Free Press. You can also find the link through Ellen’s blog post on its publication. In looking back through her blog archive, you can find posts on Ellen’s journey of discovering her ancestors’ history and dealing with its impact on her own life.

There is a commemoration occuring this weekend in Vicksburg, recovering a history that had been largely forgotten. Thank you, Ellen, for your role in bringing this history back into our consciousness.

Update: Some photos from the commemoration are available on Ellen’s blog here.

Charlottesville

On Saturday, my son-in-law L headed back to the UK to comply with the terms of his visa which only allowed 90 days to be here for ABC’s birth and early weeks. We all miss him and have been adjusting to the household without him, while, of course, responding to the changing needs and sleep patterns of a two-month-old. That and helping out my parents are quite enough to occupy me, but I felt that I had to post about the current state of affairs in the US, which is adding stress, fear, and sadness to our lives.

Donald Trump is exposing our country to danger with his saber-rattling. I hope that Congress will make clear that war declarations are their province, not the president’s. There should be no first strike against North Korea, Venezuela, or any other country without action from Congress, as the US Constitution requires.

I have long believed that Donald Trump has neither the intellect nor the temperament nor the judgment to be an effective, just, and moral president. Sadly, his reactions to Charlottesville have only reinforced this. His press conference yesterday was wrong on the facts and unconscionably upheld the alt-right/neo-nazi/white supremacist lies about their own history, motivations, and current aspirations. (I do not intend to go over this in detail or to engage in comment exchanges about this, but check out the reporting from Vice to hear the alt-right views directly from their leaders.)

This is a time when all members of Congress should clearly denounce the president for his statements and redouble their efforts to uphold civil rights and religious freedom. (The footage of torch-bearing men chanting against Jews was especially chilling.) They should also offer support to the family and friends of Heather Heyer, to all those who were injured, and to Charlottesville, which is not forthcoming from the White House as we expect in times of tragedy.

Vice-president Pence and the Cabinet should convene to discuss invoking the 25th Amendment, which was added to the Constitution to defend against an unfit president.

I do want to remind people that this is not just about some Confederate statues. These statues were not erected in the 1860s to commemorate those who fought and died. They are not battlefield monuments or historic sites. Most were placed in the 1920s, when the Ku Klux Klan was so strong that it staged marches in Washington, DC, or during the 1950s-60s, at the height of the civil rights marches. They were put in public places in order to intimidate African-Americans and anyone who supported civil rights for all. No one is proposing that we forget about the Civil War, but we need to learn about the complexities of its causes and aftermath, an endeavor which is not served by a statue of a general on a horse at a courthouse or pubic square that was erected to scare people of color.

Violence and bigotry are unacceptable. Love trumps hate.

As Nelson Mandela wrote in Long Walk to Freedom,  “No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.”