Satirical letter-to-editor defending Confederate monuments

Here is a bitingly satirical letter to the editor of the Charleston, SC Post and Courier published January 28, 2019. Following the copy from the newspaper itself, is the actual letter I sent to the Post and Courier, which contains two footnotes.

From: Gene Kizer, Jr. – Charleston Athenaeum Press Sent: Wednesday, January 23, 2019 11:51 PM To: Editor – The Post and Courier Subject: Letter to the Editor of The Post and Courier for Publication
Dear Editor of The Post and Courier,

Here is a letter for publication. I have included a couple footnotes following the letter to document my sources.

START

I was appalled to read your article entitled “Under foot, Once-ubiquitous boot scraper now mainly a historic home adornment” (Real Estate, 1/20/2019). Surely you know that many of those boot scrapers were constructed during the Jim Crow era and are therefore symbols of white supremacy racism.

I read your article by Robert R. Macdonald entitled “How history shapes Charleston’s landscape of memory” (Commentary, 1/2/19) in which Mr. Macdonald states that our Confederate monuments “could rightfully be called Jim Crow monuments because their creation coincided with the restoration of white supremacy.”

That surprised me because none of the monuments say anything about white supremacy. All they talk about are valor and war dead in a war in which somewhere between 650,000 and 850,000 Americans were killed, and over a million wounded. Here in South Carolina, we supplied approximately 60,000 Confederate soldiers to Southern armies, and 40,000 were either killed or wounded (20,000 were killed).

That’s why monuments went up, North and South. Both sides honoring war dead is what brought our country back together.

Regardless, the main issue today is those racist boot scrapers. They shouldn’t be removed, but we should denounce Jim Crow and where it started. Let’s consult distinguished historian C. Vann Woodward who wrote a famous book entitled The Strange Career of Jim Crow. He writes: “One of the strangest things about the career of Jim Crow was that the system was born in the North and reached an advanced age before moving South in force.”

END

Footnotes:

Death statistics for the war have been upped from 620,000 to between 650,000 and 850,000. These are the widely accepted statistics of historian J. David Hacker of Binghamton University. See Rachel Coker, “Historian revises estimate of Civil War dead,” published September 21, 2011, Binghamton University Research News – Insights and Innovations from Binghamton University, http://discovere.binghamton.edu/news/civilwar-3826.html. C Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (Oxford, New York, et al.: Oxford University Press, 2002), 17.

Thank you for considering my letter!
Sincerely,
Gene Kizer, Jr.
Charleston, SC 29412-2418