Embracing Memory’s Tough places – Leonard Pitts Jr. – MiamiHerald.com

Another wonderful column from one of my favorite columnists:

Actually, old times there are forgotten quite a bit.

For 145 years, ever since a grim-faced Robert E. Lee rode away from Wilmer McLean’s house in Appomattox, Va., where he had surrendered his army, apologists for the South have been trying to induce the rest of us to forget the causes of the Civil War, to imbue an act of treachery and treason with a nobility of purpose it did not, in fact, possess.

“State’s rights,” they say. “State’s rights to maintain a system of human slavery,” they do not say.

It is the social and political equivalent of an extreme makeover. The thinking seems to be: when history collides with cherished self image, change history.

Something very similar seems to be afoot with regard to a related event much closer to us in time: the civil rights movement of the ’50s and ’60s.

Just a few months ago, we saw conservative activist Glenn Beck claim ownership of that movement, in defiance of historical memory. “…[W]e were the people that did it in the first place!” he cried.

Last week, in an essay in the Washington Post, University of Virginia Professor Gerard Alexander analyzed voting trends from the civil rights era to bolster his thesis that social conservatism is not intolerant. Somehow, he never got around to explaining how it is, then, that social conservatives were always the ones standing in schoolhouse doors, blockading polling places, burning buses, and cracking skulls.

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