Letter to the Editor
Fort Worth Star-Telegram

From:
William Shannonhouse
5809 Wales Avenue
Fort Worth, TX 76133
817-294-2539 (day & night)

I was appalled to discover that on January 19—the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.– the state of Texas celebrates Confederate Heroes Day.

The irony surely can’t be lost on anyone capable of a sense of irony. Apparently many in Texas and other Southern states with similar holidays lack such a sense, as well as any sense of outrage that such a holiday continues to exist 42 years after the assassination of one of the world’s great human rights leaders by a Southern racist – possibly with government complicity — at the height of America’s struggle for civil rights.
Apparently many Texans continue to feel pride in the fact that our state seceded from the Union and its citizens willingly fought and died to defend a society whose economy relied on human trafficking, brutality and dehumanization in order to maintain a minority class of property owners in wealth and privilege.
They also apparently feel no shame in celebrating this Confederate affiliation despite the gross affront it presents to the over 8 million Texans of African American descent, and others who find the facts of American history regarding slavery, the Confederacy, Jim Crow laws, discrimination and other race-based crimes against humanity to be no cause for pride or celebration, except in the efforts to end them.
Americans would be shocked and appalled if we were to learn of a German commemoration of “heroes of the Third Reich,” yet throughout the South our own appalling history of racism and human rights abuses is still celebrated into the 21st century as a source of “cultural pride.”
I urge Texans to abandon their inherited sense of umbrage and humiliation at the defeat of the Confederacy – so absurdly inappropriate in our contemporary multicultural society — and accept at last the common purpose and dignity of the human race. Write to your state representatives and the governor urging them to remove Confederate Heroes Day from the list of worthy people and events celebrated by our official state holidays.