Greg Olson (00:00):
All right. Hey, good morning. Gentlemen, thank you for being on GROWL Connex. And my name is Greg Olsen. I am the founder of GROWL Agency today. You’re on a connex, Civil Conversations Project. Connects is really about conversations, community and connections. We’re joined here with my friend Wayne Hare of the Civil Conversation Project. I have Bill Gwaltney and I also have Dwight Pitcaithley. Thank you very much for joining us. Before we get started, I thought we’d go quickly through introductions and then I would come through and let maybe Wayne clean up any of these introductions that these gentlemen leave us there. Wayne, they might leave out something that’s kind of interesting. So why don’t we start with Wayne a quick introduction.
Wayne Hare (00:53):
I’m going to leave out a lot of interesting things. Yeah, I’m Wayne Hare. Fairly recently retired from the national park service and the Bureau of Land Management. I was a back country ranger for a career, which is where I met Bill Gwaltney and I met Dr. Pitcaithley through Bill. You know, I’ve spent a fair amount of my adult life trying to create a more diversity in the outdoors or just in the back country, both visitors and say park service employees. And I came to realize that the lack of you know, various ethnicities in the back country was just a microcosm of what you see in the country really. And politicians have always used racism to divide and conquer, but it kind of started to come on pretty thick, maybe somewhere around four or five years ago. And I have had a long-term association on the board of a magazine called High Country News. And together we started this project called the Civil Conversations Project to, just to try to highlight and help people understand racism exists. And that is, you know, kind of part of the fabric of the country. So that’s kind of a quick snapshot of you know, me and the civil conversations project. Yeah.
Greg Olson (02:19):
Thanks Wayne. We’re going to be having these conversations at least on the connect channel once a month as we bring in various speakers let’s go ahead to Bill. I’d love to hear a little bit about you, you know, so
Bill Gwaltney (02:32):
Well sure. Thanks Bill Gwaltney. I retired after a pretty long federal career. I was with the national park service for many years. I then went to the Smithsonian for a couple of years where I had the great honor of being a military history curator for the new African-American museum. And then I was five years overseas or the American battle monuments commission. So I’ve had a lot of connection with military history, but the park service gave me a fantastic to work with the movies. So, I actually got to be a technical assistant for the movie Glory and was a first Sergeant of company B, which was a part of service, your unit. So, I was actually in the movie Glory. And if you watch it, you’ll see a little credit I get at the end of the film. So the civil war was something I tried hard to avoid and just couldn’t and got in and ended up right in the middle of it.
Greg Olson (03:24):
Well, that’s very interesting. I’d love to even dive into that, that we’re here to talk about a different subject, but I’m sure you can bring that in. Dwight, thank you for being here. It’s been a really great pleasure to have a few conversation with you. Great author, lots of great information out there. So go ahead and introduce yourself.
Dwight Pitcaithley (03:43):
Well, I spent a sort of like bill a career with the national park service 30 years working in Santa Fe and Boston, and finally Washington DC, where I ended up as chief historian. I retired in 2005 and sort of had a second career here in Las Cruces, teaching very part-time at New Mexico state university, but researching the causes of the civil war or during my last couple of years as chief historian, the parts circuit superintendents of the civil war battlefields decided it was time for them to start talking about causality up until about 1998, the park service didn’t talk about pauses. They talked about the battles in depth. Didn’t talk about why those men were trying to kill each other. And I had read all the secondary literature, but I really didn’t have a good grasp on what caused it. I knew from that secondary literature, that slavery was the cause, but I, I wasn’t thoroughly not convinced, but I, I didn’t understand how all the pieces fit together. So I spent about the next 15 years, about 12 years researching the original primary official documents of succession, which amounts to about 8,000 pages, published pages published at the time. So it’s been available for at least the last 100 years. And two years ago, wrote a book titled the US Constitution in Succession, a documentary anthology of slavery and white supremacy. And now I’m working on a couple more books at the state level mining those same documents on why those States succeeded.
Greg Olson (05:24):
Yeah. we’ll also have, after the show, we’ll have information on where people can find out about all the things that you’ve written. And I will be sharing that out with our listeners and viewers. So today, gentlemen, we’re going to be talking about a subject. We’re really trying to tie in. It’s always again with the Civil Conversation Project was racism in the West and then everything happening. And so a little bit of time as Wayne and I have discussed and we discussed I’ve discussed in three of these and we have to go back in time a little to understand how we got here. So really this time that we’re spending today is on it’s really you know, we mix it in with slavery, civil war, you know, in racism. So with that, I thought, Wayne, you know, I, like I said I’ve heard you say that in order to understand a 21st century race in this country, you have to understand what caused the Confederate States. It’s a feed from the union. I mean, these are kind of big topics, but I thought we would start with that. And can you talk a little bit, and I’ll let you guys discuss this, but what did you mean by that?
Wayne Hare (06:32):
Well, I want to give quite a bit of credit to Dwight because I met Dwight through Bill and Dwight very graciously said well, any kind of Bills is a friend of mine and he started answering many questions, but, you know, my question to him was you know, can you tell me why, you know, what caused the civil war? You know, here’s what I think caused it. And he redirected my question and said, the question we really wanted to ask is why did the Southern States succeed? And you know, for a long time, if I talked about race and people would bring up slavery, I would really poopoo it, right? I say, well, you know what I’d say, what white people say that was a long time ago? Nobody alive today ever owned slaves. And it doesn’t have anything to do with, you know, the racial construct or you know, contract that we now live with in this country, but I was completely wrong. And what we’re seeing today, you know, the racial relationships and the racism that you see today, it started in 1619. You know you know, Dwight’s read on 8,000 pages and he’s read them several times, he’s studied them. And he would be able to confirm that the institution of slavery was, was really based on, you know, very strongly on the concept of the white race being supreme and the black place being inferior if you read those documents. And again, I ha I really hope Dr. Pitcaithley chimes in here, but in the original documents I’ve read don’t mention the benefits of a cheap or free labor. They really talk about white supremacy and the black race being unable to care for themselves. And this is God’s will, and, you know, slaves are happy and the institutions benign you know, and none of that is, is true. I guess one of the points that want to make is in order to enslave people you had to dehumanize them and the rehumanize of, of, you know, black Americans has never happened only the dehumanization. I want to give you an example, Greg. All right. And in 1918 in Georgia, there was a white plantation owner was murdered. The black person that was suspected of killing him wasn’t around. So, the local just kind of went on a killing spree you know, killing black Americans as they found them. They entered one man’s home on the 18th of May dragged them out and lynched him. His wife made the mistake of being angry and upset and threatening them that there, that she was going to make out warrants and had them arrested. So when they went home, they thought about that. So, yeah, we don’t really want to be arrested. So they went back and they got, and they got married, Mary Turner the next day May 19th, 1918. They dragged her out of her house. They tied her by tied her up by her feet, just hanging down. They doused with gasoline and oil, and they lit her on fire. And before she completely died, they sliced open her belly. Her unborn baby fell out and they stomped the baby to death, but this is documented. This isn’t anything I’m making up. And I’m only bringing this out, Greg, because to do that to a person, you can’t think of that person as a person, you have to dehumanize that individual way below, you know, a dog or a pig or a cow, or anything. And that, that that sense of de humanization you know, was born. It was it was it was driven home to people. And to some extent it still exists today.
Greg Olson (11:00):
Yeah. I know we’ve talked about that in previous episodes about what that means to be an in war and then slavery and race about how it is when we to dehumanize and it wasn’t. And I’ve learned a lot talking to you gentlemen, about this, you know, I want to jump in a Dwight about the 1619, and anything that you want to add to that, because, you know, this is, these are documents that I don’t think many people actually read, or, you know, they’re long documents. And, you know, I’d like to hear some of what are your thoughts on the things that like, and bill, you know, you can jump into on this, but it’s like, what are your thoughts on this? So, listeners, I’m not going to stick in 1619 land right now for too long, because I want to get forward, but we are going back on this very important historical moment. So do I, what do you want to add to this? Or what would you want our listeners to go, go explore more? I think, I think one of the things I want to pick up on what mindset, one of the things that’s important in
Dwight Pitcaithley (11:54):
Understanding slavery in the United States is that it was built upon this concept, this notion of white supremacy, not all slave societies had that slavery and Rome didn’t or Greece or Africa, certainly doesn’t come with a white supremacist component, Brazil less so but you could put that in that category, serfdom in Russia didn’t have that capacity, but in the United States and this developed over time, but fairly quickly after 1619, they the owners of slaves wanted to somehow feel good about enslaving people and developed this fairly robust, I wouldn’t call it sophisticated, but certainly a robust defense of slavery that by the 19th century became full blown, certainly between 1830 and 1860. Many gallons of ink was, was spilt defending slavery on religious grounds, historical grounds, scientific grounds. And so, so slavery wasn’t just about labor. It wasn’t just about providing a workforce for the plantation. And the many other ways that slavery was employed slavery was very adaptable. Of course. And, and so jumping forward just a little bit, maybe this is a preview to, to some more conversations we can have. When the South felt threatened with the election of Abraham Lincoln, it wasn’t just slavery that was threatened. It was white supremacy. And because most southerners didn’t own slaves, the white supremacy, the loss of white supremacy was a great motivator. Now we can talk more about that if you want, but let me stop there. And, and Bill will probably want to chime in.
Bill Gwaltney (13:55):
Yeah, but also tear off of what Wayne was saying is that in 1919, the red summer, some of the people who were lynched, not unlike the scenario Wayne talked about were included US veterans African Americans, who were hanged in their United States army uniform, continue to have dialogue about what we owe veterans. Wayne could not be more correct when he, when he says that people were dehumanized. These are people who went overseas, risked their lives, came home, were proud of the uniform that they, that they wore that represented the United States and were hanged in that same uniform. So Dwight’s talking about sort of the, the, the chemistry that created the opportunity for the civil war to happen. I want to talk a little bit about the remembrance of the war. Dwight points out. This information has been out there for years and years. The question is what do people remember? What do people choose to remember? And what does Hollywood and television decide to show us? What does poppy or a history tell us about ourselves in terms of what we remember and what we forget. Two, 209,000 African Americans served in both the army and the Navy in the civil war participated in multiple campaigns, multiple battles. And they were faced with a real problematic dichotomy. If they were good in combat, it was because they were animals. If they were failures in combat, it was because they work coward’s, there was no way to win. But the other thing I want to talk quickly about is that they weren’t just there for the flag. They had motives that had to do with personal freedom, family, freedom, citizenship education, equal rights. It really was a kind of a civil rights movement. It just happened to happen with bayonets and muskets. So what we choose to remember and what we choose to forget is really important at the end of the civil war. There were more black soldiers in union uniform than there were soldiers entirely in the Confederate army. That’s how many black soldiers had come into the fight. And, you know, people are still surprised when they see a movie like Gloria and think I did not know that well, that may be true, but the question is, how is it that you did not know? Back to you, Greg.
Well, I don’t see Greg. Wayne, maybe you’d like to pick up the thread and run a little bit.
Wayne Hare (16:42):
I think Greg is experiencing technical difficulties.
Bill Gwaltney (16:50):
Well, let me go ahead and say that the other one of the things I think connects directly to the purpose of this conversation is that in 1865, the civil war was over. Slavery was technically over, but racism and white supremacy did not die. And so, there is a causal link between the two as Dwight points out and as Wayne points out and we’re still dealing with the racism and supremacy, even though the institution of slavery is gone, and the civil war is now in the history books.
Dwight Pitcaithley (17:23):
One of the ways to, one of the ways to think about this is that because the white supremacist idea had been growing in the South, and it certainly wasn’t limited to the South. You can easily say that 1960s 61 racism was throughout the country in, in different ways, but it’s not just on the South that at the end of the war, Lincoln made sure that slavery was abolished. He re we’ve all seen the movie, Lincoln pushed the idea of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery, which of course Congress passed and was ratified by the end of the year by 18 or the end of 1865. It was ratified abolishing slavery. You can essentially legislate against slavery. You can’t legislate against white supremacy. And as both Wayne and bill have talked that white supremacist notion continued through the Jim Crow laws through the segregation, through the deprivation of basic civil rights that had been given to former slaves in the 14th and 15th amendment. Those continued for another hundred years, fast forward to 1950s and 1960s. Finally, the United States Congress decides to do something about it passes the civil rights bill of 64, the voting rights bill of 65, which creates more of a playing field, but neither one of those bills did anything to get rid of white supremacy and fast forward to today, we’re seeing another resurgence of it. It’s the underside of the dark side of this country that we cannot seem to get rid of.
Wayne Hare (19:07):
Yeah, those are, those are really, really good points. And you know, I’ve said for, you know, for years what you were saying, you can’t legislate you know, racial justice because you cannot just like laws, you know, you can make schools integrated or you can try that hasn’t worked so well, but, you know, you can make the, you know, the workplace integrated and you know, bus seats available to all ethnicities, but that does nothing to change people’s hearts and minds and, and we’re an A that’s what has to happen for racial justice to happen. And it, and that’s where this whole connection to slavery came from, you know, that, that whole concept of white supremacy, black inferiority you know, fear, hatred, disgust, you know, that, that was all that groundwork was well laid, you know, from 1619 forward. And it, you know, it just, it’s just such a part of you know, it’s, it’s kind of a part of who this country is, who this country has become. The question I suppose, is how did that whole thing come up about, about this, about the war had nothing to do with slavery. It was just, it had to do with this noble cause of you know, rights States’ rights, you know, this is where the Southern States truly that committed to being independent and maintaining state’s rights. Were there any state traits that they opposed?
Dwight Pitcaithley (20:57):
Yeah, it’s an interesting alternative narrative where you might say that only begins after the war, before the war. And again, you have to look at these 18,000 pages. It’s very clear that what concerned the South was an incoming Republican administration, that the South believed was an abolitionist administration. That Lincoln was an abolitionist that the Republican party was an abolitionist party, that the North was filled with abolitionists of the John Brown Stripe. None of which was true, but they believed it. And so the, the documentation before the war, and they were very vocal about this and very vocal about preserving white supremacy as well. It’s one of the, one of the surprises in the research is that they didn’t mince any words when they talked about the supremacy of the white race and the need to maintain them. So, after the war with the stunning loss on the part of the South, on the part of the Confederacy they wanted to feel better about this. And so, it, I don’t know if you can pinpoint the beginning, but both Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy in 1860s, 1868, and Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy in the seventies wrote histories of the war and began shaping the narrative away from slavery and toward constitutional issues, state right issues, and that sort of thing. And there was sort of in a, in an early nascent kind of form come the development of the sons and the daughters of the Confederacy, United daughters of the Confederacy and the sons of Confederate veterans in the 1890s, they embrace this and particularly the United daughters gravitate write books about it, lecture, create Confederate perimeters for children that drill into now generations of southerners, that it was about States’ rights. It wasn’t about slavery, that slavery was dying out. Most southerners didn’t own slaves, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And the new kid on the block now is the tariff that South succeeded to prevent protective terrorists from being development, being developed by the Republicans as was the case in the 1830s. There’s absolutely no evidence for that in the run-up to the war. It’s very easy to debunk that. And let me drill in just a minute on the, on the state’s rights issue, the big surprise in, in my research and the, and the reason for the book, actually, I was just satisfying myself before then was the discovery of dozens and, and dozens of constitutional amendments proposed over secession winter to solve the problem. 90%. There are 67 of these in Congress and state legislatures in the Washington peace convention in a number of several of the state succession conventions, Virginia, in particular, 90% of these amendments proposed expanding and protecting the rights of slave owners in the federal constitution. That’s the opposite end of protecting States rights. And the poster child for that is none other than Jefferson Davis, who on Christmas Eve, 1860 proposed a constitutional amendment that would have nationalized slavery. That specifically said this amendment under this amendment, slaves are identified as property. And that form of property will be protected as every other form of property is protected by the fifth amendment. The due process clause that says no citizen can be defined deprived of life, Liberty, or property without due process of law. So contrary to the lost cause idea that the South seceded to protect States’ rights on the Eve of the civil war, they were working like crazy to greatly expand federal protections and give up a very treasured right to protect slavery at the state level. So very odd and sort of ironic twist in this history of this period.
Bill Gwaltney (25:23):
As usual, the white of course is completely on target. I think in one way, the South lost the war, but one the peace that the kind of administrative and structural elements that we’ll include them in black codes and new state constitutions, which denigrated African Americans you also see the creation of monuments, something that’s in the news of late at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and you’ll find a monument to, Heyward Shepherd who was killed in the dark in the John Brown rate. Well, he’s made out to be this loyal slave. He was, nobody knew who he was. He got, he raised the alarm, he got shot. He got shot but other monuments come along during this period where the solidification of what Dwight’s talking about, white supremacy and the normalization of degradation of African Americans becomes normalized. And you see it in housing, you see it in banking, you see it in land ownership, you’ll see it in education. You see it in jobs, you see it in medicine, something else that’s in the news these days when world war II comes to an end and the GI bill is created not only are African-American soldiers in their families excluded from housing options in the suburbs, they don’t even get same opportunities for the GI bill. So these sorts of things run very deep in American history and American psyche.
Greg Olson (26:55):
There’s a lot of time that has gone by, I mean, obviously, I mean, I’m thinking about 1619, and I appreciate you kind of going back to help us go forward. And I think we’ll dive deeper into those subjects also on future shows because each one of these kinds of comments and questions require even more information. So, going back to what kind of Dwight was saying, you know, this whole loss cause interpretation, as I’ve done some look at that, it’s a way to kind of, you know, when I’ve been looking at it says the term simply came into common use of the reference on the military to feet, but to feet of the Southern way of life. And so you know, so I think that’s been misinterpreted in history books or in teachings and things like that. So is there any kind of, a couple of points that you want to bring into that because I want, I know we have some links and things we’re going to be posting after this, about the lost cause.
Bill Gwaltney (27:51):
Well, I guess what I can offer in that vein is that in many, many ways the war is over, but the work of the civil war is not an essential elements of liberation and equality are still very much sort of ghost rattling their chains in the in the American landscape that need to be addressed. And, and I am concerned that you know, just like people have gotten tired of wearing the masks to prevent the spread of COVID. I think people may have compassion fatigue when it comes to equity and diversity as well. I hope I’m wrong.
Greg Olson (28:29):
You know, I think one of the things that I’ve heard you say I don’t know if it was Wayne or the wider you build. It was like slavery ended, but racism continued. And I think that’s a comment that is, I think kind of again, opened up my eyes about, through all of this, right. That didn’t go away. And I think that’s part of that white supremacy piece that that’s been kind of since 1619 or in that, is that kind of why we’re still here?
Dwight Pitcaithley (29:00):
I think so. I think so and I go back to a comment I made earlier that racism, white supremacy isn’t limited to the South for those of us serve a certain age, remember the bus price in Boston, Boston, the city on the Hill with more universities per capita than any other place on the planet. Violent race riots and bus riots, because people want in Boston and Massachusetts wanted to create equity for black children in that, in that state. I want to go back to the lost cause for a minute, because it’s interesting that the turn, the lost cause is drawn from a book titled the longest quote was written by an editor in Virginia, by the name of Edward Pollard, the histories of the war, as the word develop in 1866, he published the definitive, the final version, I should say of the Lost Cause. It’s about 600 pages behind my head here in one of those brown, thick books. And at the end of it, it’s just sort of a history of, at the end of it, he says, two things are cleared. So session is dead and slavery is dead, but white supremacy is not. And we need to continue the fight for that. Two years later, 1867, he wrote another book that’s less well-known caused the law called the lost cause regained. I’m pretty sure he wrote it as a, an election tome, 1868 during the grant election. And in that one is much shorter and you can buy replicas of this for $10. He doubles down on that and says very clearly the purpose of the civil war was to defend white supremacy.
And that is our job today. So, it’s interesting that the term, the lost cause has now become associated with States’ rights, the tariff, any of these ABS arguments, anything that slavery to make us feel good about talking about the past. When in fact, the term comes from a fellow who was defending white supremacy at the end of the war at the immediate end of the war, and then in the election of 1868, doubling down on that, making it clear that the inferiority of the black person must not be allowed to be lost. And in fact, in that book and the Lost Cause there’s a whole chapter defending the inferiority of black people from the religious point of view, the historical point of view, the scientific point of view. But so the name continues, but the content of what Edward Pollard was talking about was lost.
Greg Olson (31:45):
Mm. I think that goes to why so many people miss, I mean, I don’t know why they misunderstand the civil war. I think I’m one of those people also, you know, because they don’t talk about it very well in history books and things like that. So I don’t know. I think why don’t we close out on that? Wayne, if you have anything I’d like to start with you, and then we’ll kind of go around about this, but, you know, I mean, we talk about Wayne and I were talking about different books that are out there about history has historical relevance and historical truth, but is that the main, why people miss, miss, do you think it’s one of the main things when people misunderstood it because people don’t know that it was to defend white supremacy or do you think it gets because many people think it was because of slavery, they were trying to, you know, knock out slavery or things like that, but really that’s not true.
Wayne Hare(32:40):
Greg, you know, you don’t, you haven’t misinterpreted what you’ve been taught. You’ve been taught as many Americans have been a false narrative, a false history about this country’s history, about the civil war and slavery. That was a very specific you know, well intentioned you know, process to reinterpret that history throughout the country and particularly without throughout the South. So, you learned what you were taught well depending on who you talk to you know, Q research or Dr. Pitcaithley or James Lowen historian author who wrote lies. My teacher told me in lies across America somewhere between 40 and 80 or 90% of Americans believe that the war was about States’ rights. Some high percentage, somewhere between 50 and 90% of teachers believe it was about States’ rights. And so, I want to kind of circle back that, that States’ rights thing a little bit, because so much of what you will read the newspaper about policies and decisions and turmoil and controversies kind of loops back to the federal government is interfering with state’s rights. We fought a war over state’s rights. We did not fight a war over state’s rights. It did not happen. I want to go back to a guy named Lee Atwater, who was a senior political consultant to Richard Nixon and the first George Bush, George HW Bush. I want to read something that he said to one of his presidents. I don’t know which one “tart out in 1954, by saying… by 1968, you can’t say, that hurts you backfires. So you stay, so you stay stuck like a forced busing Nate’s rights and all that stuff. And you’re getting so abstract. Now you’re talking about cutting taxes and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things. And the byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” So, you know, my point here is that you know there are certain terms that, that, that, that are referred to as code talk, right? And state’s rights, is one of those terms. So when politicians get up there and they’re advocating for States’ rights, that’s a dog whistle that that, that some white people who are opposed to racial justice, they understand that that what that politician is saying, when he talks about state’s rights, he’s talking about I’m on your side and, you know, we’re going to keep society the way it is, the way it was intended to be. It, it, it’s, it’s such an important concept and term that, that Americans need to understand that that nothing has anything to do with state’s rights. That’s a dog whistle. Okay. And back to you, Dwight or Bill
Greg Olson (35:45):
More on that in future, but do you guys have a comment on that, that you want to add to our listeners?
Bill Gwaltney (35:49):
I think I can add to what Wayne saying. And that is that when you think about it today, you mentioned the civil war. Every American has some concept of what it is or what it was perhaps ill informed, hardly anyone that has a concept of what the period of reconstruction was after the civil war. One has to ask why that is the case. When you say reconstruction to most people, they think you’re talking about Visel house on PPS, according to Mr. Lowen, who Wayne talked about, and I have not, you know, double-checked his research, but he claims that there are more monuments in this country to Nathan Bedford. Forrest was a Confederate cavalry commander accused of a war crime in which black soldiers were murdered after surrendering, and who was one of the founders of the original KKK. There are supposedly more monuments to him than there are to George Washington. So what does that mean if that’s true?
Dwight Pitcaithley (36:53):
I just like to add just a little bit on both those points, but about the, the longevity of the lost cause. And I think it goes back to the aftermath of the war, the 19th century, the North won the war. They didn’t care about the memory. So the lost cause idea of shifting blame to federal intervention in state’s rights, as the cause as the major narrative, didn’t have a counter narrative, there was no opposing narrative and even some historians during this period, again, because of the power of white supremacy bought into that as well. And so it kind of had free reign and the growth of it became a cottage industry in the South with no opposition. And so that’s, it’s, it’s an after generations now of people hearing about it from their parents, from their grandparents, from their teachers, from their ministers. It, it, it, it’s a part of this, not just the Southern DNA, but DNA and other parts of the country as well.
Greg Olson (38:03):
Well, I tell you what that, I certainly appreciate it. I think we could probably talk hours and hours of this record and we’re going to, through Civil Conversations and Wayne, we’re going to get deeper into topics about racism what it means, how do we fix it. We’re not here to talk about that so much today, but we have spent time going backwards and I still think we’ll have to do that Wayne more. Cause I think there’s a lot of subjects that we’re going to have to dive into to help clear up the muddy waters, right.
Wayne Hare (38:36):
There’s a lot of layers on that onion that needed to get peeled away.
Greg Olson (38:39):
We’ll get there. In closing, I wanted to go around and just say, is there one final point that maybe each of you want to leave our listeners and future viewers of this? And this helps us helps as we kind of promote content out. So Bill, I’m going to go with you and I’m going to end with Wayne.
Bill Gwaltney (38:57):
Sure. I’ll be happy to sort of end with a quote from Frederick Douglas abolitionist and civil war recruiter. He said once let a black man get upon his person, the brass letters, us and noodle on his button, a musket on his shoulder and bullets in his pocket. There was no force on the face of the earth that can deny he has earned a full rights of citizenship in the United States.
Dwight Pitcaithley (39:23):
I can’t talk to that. Douglas is always a good man to quote I would leave our listeners, our viewers with the fact that the South really did succeed to protect slavery and white supremacy. And if we have any Texas viewers who want to confirm that search on Texas’s declaration of succession, not it’s ordinance of secession, but the declaration of secession drafted by the secession convention members and voted on by them. It’s about four pages, go to the last couple of paragraphs and they really doubled down on this issue of white supremacy and how important it is to maintain and put a thread. It is because of the incoming Lincoln administration.
Greg Olson (4:15)
Hmm. Interesting. Okay. Wayne, what do you want to, what wise words will be on again, a another show so they can keep checking here will help we’ll determine our next topic, but what do you want to end with today?
Wayne Hare (40:28):
You know, just that, that you know, you said we need to go back to go forward and, and race is such a complex issue. You know, it was made complex you know, over all these hundreds of years. And anyways, as we’ve kind of said here that, you know, we we’ve been taught in school by teachers that we looked up to it and thought they knew what they were talking about. So many, so many myths about race and, and, and really, and, and you know, just, just miss about race and myths about this country. And I guess I just want to, and I’ll close out by helping Dwight’s listeners, so they don’t have to go and dig out the declaration of causes from Texas. What Texas said was we hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, you know, the Confederacy itself were established exclusively by the white race for themselves in their posterity, that the African race had no agency in their establishment, that they were rightfully held and regarded as inferior in a dependent race. and in that condition only could their existence in this country, we rented beneficial or tolerable. Notice, they didn’t say anything about the benefits of free labor, just about the inferiority of the black race and the superiority, the white race. And we’ve been, you know, this country has been taught that forever. It’s going to be a hard it’s going to be a hard, sell that to, to peel away all those, to be able to all those layers. So thanks for doing this, Greg.
Greg Olson (42:04):
Well, I appreciate your everybody’s time. It certainly has been an eye opener to me and continue to read and explore. And I like how we’re looking back in these older state documents and what was written in what was said. So, I appreciate all the research that you know, Dwight, thank you Bill and Wayne, it’s been amazing. So I think we’re about to close out. And we didn’t have we have I’ve asked all the questions that have come through and we’ll look forward to posting this out on a growl connects channel. And I wish all of you a very wonderful day and thank you to our listeners today and our listeners in the future.