You might not be aware of the fact that today is the birthday of Jefferson Finis Davis—unless you work for the state of Alabama and have the day off. The president of the Confederate States of America (who said at his inauguration, “We recognized the negro as God and God's Book and God's laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him. Our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude") was born on June 3, 1808, and Alabama is the last state that still marks his birth with an official holiday dedicated to him.
Alabama isn’t the only state that celebrates a country that fought a war against the United States of America. Confederate Memorial Day is an official holiday celebrated in Alabama, Florida, Mississippi, and Georgia in April; in South Carolina and North Carolina in May; and in Texas in January, where it’s known as Confederate Heroes’ Day.
Alabama, in an apparent bid to be as offensive as it possibly can, has combined the birthday of Robert E. Lee (who said of slavery, “The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence”) with the holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. into one.
On this day that commemorates, in 2019, a man who led a country that fought to maintain the possession of human beings as chattel, in a state that to this day whitewashes the history of that man and that fight, it is fitting to hear the voices of the victims of Lee’s “instruction.” These are the people we should be commemorating.
The overseers was terrible hard on us. They’d ride up and down the field and haste you so twell you near about fell out. Sometimes and in general everything you hid the crowd you got a good lickin’ with the bullwhip that the driver had in the saddle with him. I heard mammy say that one day they whipped poor Leah twell she fall out like she was dead. Then they rubbed salt and pepper on the blisters to make them burn real good. She was so so twell she couldn’t lay on her back nights, and she just couldn’t stand for no clothes to touch (her) back whatsoever.