The Confederate States of America are still with us, but dying a slow, painful death
We are currently living in the third act of my 2006 film, “CSA: The Confederate States of America,” where Confederate presidential candidate Sen. John Ambrose Fauntroy, racked with scandal and faced with the nation turning against him, clings to the heritage of the Confederacy for his salvation.
Since the election of President Donald Trump, observers have commented that my faux-documentary plays like an actual documentary. In a 2017 review of the film in The New Yorker, Richard Brody commented, “We can’t say we weren’t warned, and sometimes the warning comes from far away and goes unheeded.”
I would argue people failed to see that warning because we have always lived in two countries: the CSA and the USA.
The Founding Fathers created a remarkable document in the U.S. Constitution. Unfortunately, many of the founders were slave owners who created a democracy with African slavery at its center. They called it the United States of America, but as we learned in 1860 when Abraham Lincoln threatened to free those slaves, Virginia and the Southern colonies were actually constituted more as the Confederate States of America. Those states chose secession from the United States because of their fomented desire to own Africans.
Since that moment, we have been in a rolling civil war in the United States. We are currently still at war. The Confederacy’s surrender in 1865 shifted the conflict to a cold civil war, where Northern whites offered, as part of a national reunion of the two regions, to accept the Southern way of life. That way of life was unquestioned white supremacy and Jim Crow segregation, with legal terrorism and lynching employed to enforce its precepts. President Woodrow Wilson embodied this best when his words were used to endorse the Ku Klux Klan in the 1915 film “Birth of a Nation,” which he reportedly described as “like writing history with lightning.”
This is where the story ends for white Americans. Unfortunately for African Americans, life in post-slavery America quickly became another installment of oppression and legal violence. That is how the South actually won. The CSA surrendered on the battlefield, but succeeded in installing an already existing white supremacy in various forms in the North into a permanent American way of life. This is how Lawrence, which was in the free state of Kansas, become like The University of Missouri — segregated.
The war continued for Black Americans in the form of genocide, discrimination and second-class semi-citizenship. It is so frustrating to see white Americans surprised by the HBO show “Watchmen,” where they learned that Tulsa, Oklahoma, was the site of a genocidal removal of the Black community in 1921. That form of genocide occurred in almost every major Black community in the country during the CSA’s war crimes of the 1910s and 1920s. The insult on top of the injury is that none of us was taught about these post-Civil War atrocities. The reason we were never taught was because the victims’ Black lives didn’t matter.
Yes, we must grudgingly accept the failings of these past cultural norms and backward beliefs. Not every owner of slaves and fighter of Native Americans can be eliminated from America’s ugly past. Our complex, bloody, racist history is literally embedded into the DNA of the nation.
However, we can concentrate on those figures who are defined by their crimes and actions. Today’s ongoing purge of commemorations of people who fought against American ideals, conducted by young Americans of all colors, is one of the most optimistic moments in our nation’s long struggle with its legacy of racial violence.
The USA is having a comeback.
NASCAR banning the flag of slavery, corporations embracing Black Lives Matter, the state of Mississippi removing its flag of hate, Aunt Jemima and Uncle Ben being retired — these are all signs the CSA is losing.
However, the CSA has not survived for more than 200 years for no reason. It needs fresh racism and angry white notions of supremacy to survive. Our commander in chief knows he must provide daily feedings to the always-hungry race monster to keep it alive.
Trump plans to leave extreme national division in the wake of his defeat. When the CSA surrendered in 1865, die-hard Confederates such as John Wilkes Booth turned to terrorism and assassination. The army of the CSA refused to take Black soldiers prisoner because African American freedom was a personal affront to them.
These next few months will be stressful, as we hopefully dismantle the Confederate States of America in the voting booth, and once again make real the dream called the United States of America.
Kevin Willmott is a professor of film at the University of Kansas. He won an Academy Award for cowriting the screenplay of the movie “BlacKkKlansman.”
Lifting Black KC Voices
This is an installment in our new project, Lifting Black KC Voices. We’ve asked African Americans from a variety of walks of life to share their experiences about being Black in Kansas City, with an eye toward the future we will all build together.
This story was originally published July 14, 2020 at 1:50 PM.