{"id":152204,"date":"2015-05-19T16:08:55","date_gmt":"2015-05-19T16:08:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=152204"},"modified":"2015-05-19T16:08:55","modified_gmt":"2015-05-19T16:08:55","slug":"civil-war-rages-black-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/civil-war-rages-black-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Civil War Rages On for Black America"},"content":{"rendered":"

(inequality.org<\/a>) –\u00a0Hundreds of African-American men marched to the White House this past\u00a0Sunday. They were not wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon Martin. They were not making the \u201chands up don\u2019t shoot\u201d gesture in honor of Michael Brown.<\/p>\n

\n

They were wearing blue wool trousers and greatcoats, forage caps and cavalry boots\u2013in honor of African American soldiers who fought in the Civil War. Their aim: to correct a wrong made in 1865, when black soldiers were left out of the Grand Review, the Union Army\u2019s victory parade.<\/p>\n

1865? Seriously? With all the critically important racial justice causes of 2015?<\/p>\n

\u201cEverything about the Civil War is present tense,\u201d author\u00a0C.R. Gibbs<\/a>\u00a0told me. \u201cThis is not settled. Ferguson and Baltimore are just match flares on a long historical fuse.\u201d<\/p>\n

One need look no further than the U.S. Supreme Court docket for evidence of the Civil War in our contemporary lives. In March, the court heard a case regarding a request by the Sons of Confederate Veterans for a special Texas license plate featuring a Confederate battle flag.<\/p>\n

In 2010, the Virginia public school system introduced a 4th\u00a0grade\u00a0textbook<\/a>\u00a0with bogus claims about thousands of loyal slaves fighting on the side of the Confederacy. The source? The Sons of Confederate Veterans.<\/p>\n

Such disinformation is part of a broader neo-Confederate movement to deny that slavery was a major factor in the conflict\u2013and to bury the history of African-Americans\u2019 active role in their own emancipation.<\/p>\n

Dr. Clarence Anthony Bush, whose great-grandfather fought in a light artillery regiment of the U.S. Colored Troops (USCT), told me it\u2019s especially critical for young people to learn this little-known history. \u201cSome African-Americans feel a little ashamed, thinking it was Abraham Lincoln who gave them their freedom. When you know your people\u00a0fought\u00a0for their freedom, it changes the way we look at ourselves and what our abilities are.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bush created a\u00a0gospel jazz musical<\/a>\u00a0about black Civil War soldiers that was performed at the\u00a0African American Civil War Museum<\/a>\u00a0in Washington, DC. Nearby is a monument engraved with names of the more than 200,000 USCT members. By war\u2019s end, they made up 10 percent of federal troops.<\/p>\n

For years, the museum has been tracking down descendants of black Civil War soldiers, recording their stories, and organizing them for the big Grand Review 150. On the eve of the parade, they hosted a vigil in which descendants from across the country paid tribute to their ancestors. Audrea Barnes, a second cousin of First Lady Michelle Obama, spoke about one of their mutual slave ancestors, Jerry Sutton (aka Suter), who ran away from a plantation in Alabama and joined the USCT\u2019s 55th Regiment. Through archival research, she\u2019s learned of his struggles for military pay equity and a failed attempt to obtain a veteran\u2019s disability pension.<\/p>\n

While the pension program was supposed to be color-blind,\u00a0Brigham Young University<\/a>\u00a0research confirms that African-American veterans received less than their white counterparts. In part, this was a result of a lack of necessary documentation, but bureaucrats were also less likely to believe their claims. For example, they approved 44 percent of white soldiers\u2019 claims regarding back pain, compared to only 16 percent of such claims by black soldiers.<\/p>\n

A century and a half after the Civil War, racial inequalities in America are still staggering. Median income for nonwhites is only 65 percent that of whites. The wealth gap is even wider, with white families\u2019\u00a0net worth six times<\/a>\u00a0that of non-whites.<\/p>\n

Jeremiah Lowery, a 29-year-old labor activist with\u00a0Restaurant Opportunities Centers United<\/a>, told me he attended the Grand Review because \u201cJust like the slogan \u2018Black Lives Matter,\u2019 black history matters too. They started to break down institutions of slavery 150 years ago. Today we have institutions that block people from earning a living wage and make people victims of brutality in the streets. It\u2019s all connected.\u201d<\/p>\n

African-Americans led the Grand Review in 2015, but hundreds of white re-enactors also marched. \u201cWe even had people who\u2019ve always re-enacted as Confederates put on Union uniforms today,\u201d said African-American Civil War Museum Director (and former civil rights activist) Dr. Frank Smith.<\/p>\n

Asked whether the event was more poignant in light of the explosion of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Smith said, \u201cThe Civil War led to the passage of the 14th\u00a0Amendment, which was supposed to ensure that the federal government protected African-Americans when states didn\u2019t. These young men don\u2019t feel safe. And today it\u2019s not just in the South, it\u2019s in the North too. The fact that people are in the streets, though\u2013that\u2019s what gives me hope.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/b><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(inequality.org) –\u00a0Hundreds of African-American men marched to the White House this past\u00a0Sunday. They were not wearing hoodies in honor of Trayvon Martin. They were not making the \u201chands up don\u2019t shoot\u201d gesture in honor of Michael Brown. They were wearing blue wool trousers and greatcoats, forage caps and cavalry boots\u2013in honor of African American soldiers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":152392,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18,1616],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-152204","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-usa-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152204","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=152204"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/152204\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/152392"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=152204"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=152204"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=152204"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}