I suppose most Southerners have something to say about the goings on after the Charleston shooting and all the media attention about the battle flag. As a boy growing up in Chattanooga Tennessee literally in an area peppered with cannons and Civil War Monuments, I had no idea that the Civil War was even about slavery. That seems as outrageous to my to say as it must be to read. When I hear other people say things like that, I hear it as possibly reconstructing history, but for me to say otherwise would be a lie. My Dad was from an Italian immigrant family; grew up in a Northern coal mining town on the wrong side of prejudice; and came South on a football scholarship. My mother was from rural Georgia – a vaudeville family – and a soft spoken do-gooder somewhere to the left of anyone else in Tennessee I ever met. We were raised to sit in the back of the bus and go out of our way to be respectful to black people. It was odd, because I never met anyone else that said that, But for that matter, I can’t recall anyone actually talking about segregation much in those times. It was just part of the fabric of life. And it was disconnected from the stories of chivalry and honor – and that flag.<\/p>\n
\nBack in the summer of 66, my young wife and I took a camping trip down the Mississippi Delta from Memphis where I was finishing Medical School. We wanted to take some Jim Crow pictures to preserve what it had been like there – thinking that we were finally on the downhill leg of the Civil Rights Movement, and people might try to forget. In the course of our travels, we saw a sign to Ruleville Mississippi<\/strong> – a place we’d heard of from watching the Democratic Convention when the Mississippi Freedom Democrat Party tried to be seated. Their most eloquent spokesperson was Fannie Lou Hamer<\/strong><\/a> from Ruleville, a tiny town in the heart of the cotton fields that covered the Delta in those days. [Notice that President Johnson cut her off of national television during her speech]:<\/div>\n