No Statute of Limitations for Confederacy's Evil

How disingenuous of Jeffrey W. Vanke (Letter: "Kilson Must Tell Us When It Is Time for Forgiveness," Feb. 21, 1996) to make the matter of the atonement White America must make for Slavery--and the Grand Apartheid which followed and lasted until 1965--a matter merely of white individuals apologizing to black individuals. It's readily apparent that Vanke needs to pretend that the dominion of the Confederacy ended with Lee's surrender at Appomattox and was not soon thereafter re-constructed via a voluminous number of legislative and extra-legal acts, including the Plessy decision, of the White South and the White North. Still, it is rather breathtaking to come across a living historian who denies, albeit implicitly, that Slavery and its successor regime were not fully-fledged systems established and perpetuated by the White Majority to steal the labor of African-Americans and deny them the opportunity to compete equally in society. But then, I suppose that's his backup for implicitly declaring there are no vestiges of the legacy of Slavery and Grand Apartheid still at work in American society.

In fact, of course, the moral depravity and legal poison which bespatter the blueprint of the Confederacy--the Confederate Constitution of 1861--and the enormous, government sanctioned advantage that gave whites over blacks lasted until the passage of the civil rights and voting rights acts in 1964 and 1965. Given that history, a history which remains as fresh as today's news, I'd say that it takes a special attraction to the evasion of moral responsibility toward one's fellow human beings, which the old Confederates of the 19th century--and the neo-Confederates of today--exemplify, to declare there's statute of limitations on acts of extraordinary evil, whether or not they were committed by one's ancestors. --Lee A. Daniels '71   Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for   Afro-American Research