My fight with my brother and sister is about something simple … letting the world know my father’s story as the head of the first medical company to enter Buchenwald. My Dad’s horror at what he saw is a lesson for everyone.
My own family has said this is an obsession. Perhaps, but at 72, having watched my father deal with anti-Semitism in our home town, having been stoned by my classmates because they saw me as the killer of Jesus, having gone to an elite public school where the words kike and nigger were usually in the same sentence, having fought with others my age in the Civil Rights Movement, having watched African Americans mistreated as athletes at my own white university …. seems to me that this is a good thing to do.
For me, that horror is made worse by knowing that my sister, Stephanie Quick and her husband William Quick, choose to live in South Carolina … a state with a heritage and a continuing tradition that dishonors the memory not only of my father but of all Americans who have fought against racism.
Their state recently appointed a confederate general, a local politician with no academic credentials, someone who play acts as a general with his own black slaves, to head a public college locates close to Charleston’s old slave
market.
What irony! On the eve of WWII, as the Buchenwald camp was being opened, the Citadel, a military college run by the State of South Carolina, decided to display its racist symbol .. the Stars and Bars of the Confederacy in the school’s chapel.
This reasoning led me to make the image above. Can there be any doubt that Nazi soldiers fought for their country with all the gallantry of the rebels who fought under the Stars and Bars? I wonder how many of the good Tea Party members of South Carolina’s government remember Ronald Reagan, their saint, visiting Bitberg to honor the gallantry of the dead Nazi soldiers.
After Henry Darby , a Charleston County Councilman, objected to the presence
of the flag in a college receiving almost $1 million in public funding, the South Carolina Solicitor General Robert D. Cook said South Carolina’s 2000 “Heritage Act” protects “monuments and memorials honoring the gallantry and sacrifice in this state’s various wars.”
Hmm, didn’t South Carolina fight in WWII? Hell, SC even hosted a camp for German POWs and recently has discussed making that a memorial.
I admire Mr. Darby’s effort but may never understand why anyone, especially an African American or a Jew, would choose to live there?
“a state with a heritage and a continuing tradition that dishonors the memory not only of my father but of all Americans who have fought against racism.”
We (I am from SC even though I live in Sweden) also have a heritage of Freedom Fighters who are/were just as much South Carolinians as the confederates. Modjeska Monteith Simpkins was one such person. (this article hardly does her justice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modjeska_Monteith_Simkins) I had the honor of hearing her speak when I was about 17 or 18 years old. Denmark Vessey was another Freedom Fighter as were the Grimke sisters.
One of the reasons I started my blog was to promote awareness of our REAL history and counter the “gone with the wind” style narratives about the old south that are just as much fiction as anything I’ve written!
When my Swedish friend and colleague wrote a world history of slavery a few years ago he described the southern slave-owners as having “an almost fascist level of contempt for human weakness” (translation mine). This is certainly not an accident or coincidence.