Latest news with #LostCause
Yahoo
6 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
House Dem to McMahon: Why is Education Department ‘taking its lead from Jim Crow'?
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) sharply questioned Education Secretary Linda McMahon during a Wednesday House hearing about the department's actions against diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), alleging the federal agency is 'taking its lead from Jim Crow.' 'To be honest, and to be very clear, I want to say that this administration has undoubtedly revived the culture of racism we haven't seen since the Jim Crow era. They've made it clear that open attacks on Black and brown and other marginalized communities is not just tolerated, but it's encouraged,' Lee said. The calls to remove DEI measures, Lee said, 'in favor of 'traditional American values' is indistinguishable from post Civil War South advocating to write history with the Lost Cause narrative.' 'I have a question, some questions, excuse me, about why this department is taking its leads from Jim Crow,' she continued. Lee specifically criticized the Department of Education's letter in April telling schools they needed to sign a certification saying they were DEI-free or risk losing federal funding. McMahon dismissed the concern, saying no schools have lost funding, as Lee pointed out the directive was preliminarily blocked by multiple judges. 'During your confirmation hearing, you were asked by Sen. Chris Murphy [D-Conn.] if an African American history class violated the administration's position on diversity, equity and inclusion, you said you want to look into it. You've been on the job for a few … months now. Have you been able to look into it?' Lee asked. 'I do not think that African studies or Middle East studies or Chinese studies are part of DEI if they are taught as part of the total history package,' McMahon responded. After some back and forth, McMahon concluded, 'African history can certainly be taught' without concerns of DEI. 'Oh, thank you,' Lee said. She also peppered McMahon with questions whether schools can have Pride celebrations or accurately teach that former President Biden won the 2020 election, growing frustrated and cutting off McMahon when she would not answer yes or no. 'I think our studies should all be taught accurately,' McMahon said. The exchange highlighted the frustration among Democrats during the hearing as they hammered McMahon over cuts to contracts and employees at the federal agency. McMahon is sitting in front of the House committee to defend her department's priorities while funding considerations are still on the table. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
6 days ago
- General
- The Hill
House Dem to McMahon: Why is Education Department ‘taking its lead from Jim Crow'?
Rep. Summer Lee (D-Pa.) sharply questioned Education Secretary Linda McMahon during a Wednesday House hearing about the department's actions against diversity, equity and inclusion, alleging the federal agency is 'taking its lead from Jim Crow.' 'To be honest, and to be very clear, I want to say that this administration has undoubtedly revived the culture of racism we haven't seen since the Jim Crow era. They made it clear that open attacks on Black and brown and other marginalized communities is not just tolerated, but it's encouraged,' Lee said. The calls to remove DEI measures, Lee said, 'in favor of 'traditional American values' is indistinguishable from post Civil War South advocating to write history with the Lost Cause narrative.' 'I have a question, some questions, excuse me, about why this department is taking its leads from Jim Crow,' she continued. Lee specifically criticized the Department of Education's letter in April telling schools they needed to sign a certification saying they were DEI-free or risk losing federal funding. McMahon dismissed the concern, saying no schools have lost funding, as Lee pointed out the directive was preliminarily blocked by multiple judges. 'During your confirmation hearing, you were asked by Senator Chris Murphy if an African American history class violated the administration's position on diversity, equity and inclusion, you said you want to look into it. You've been on the job for a few minutes months now. Have you been able to look into it?' Lee asked. 'I do not think that African Studies or Middle East Studies or Chinese studies are part of DEI if they are taught as part of the total history package,' McMahon responded. After some back and forth, McMahon concluded 'African history can certainly be taught' without concerns of DEI. 'Oh, thank you,' Lee said. She also peppered McMahon with questions whether schools can have Pride celebrations or accurately teach that former President Biden won the 2020 election, growing frustrated and cutting off McMahon when she would not answer yes or no. 'I think our studies should all be taught accurately,' McMahon said. The exchanged highlighted the frustration among Democrats during the hearing as they hammered McMahon over cuts to contracts and employees at the federal agency. McMahon is sitting in front of the House committee to defend her department's priorities while funding considerations are still on the table.
Yahoo
21-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Nottoway dishonored my enslaved ancestors. Why I still hated to see it destroyed.
With its 200 windows and 165 doors fashioned by enslaved craftsmen and put in place with enslaved labor, Louisiana's Nottoway Plantation was the South's largest antebellum mansion, or 'big house.' It was also a place that tour guides infamously sold a romanticized and sanitized version of plantation life about, and for generations, those who ran the plantation hosted weddings, graduations and school field trips where Black schoolchildren and their parents often felt diminished and alienated. As The Associated Press has noted, Nottoway 'makes no mention of enslaved former inhabitants on its website.' A fire on Thursday that destroyed Nottoway's big house led to a predictable response. Some Black people posted selfies presumably taken at Nottoway that showed the burning house behind them. People shared memes that added the images of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman, uncharacteristically grinning, to photos of the mansion on fire. Other memes showed Black people enjoying an outdoor cookout with the burning house in the background. 'We're very devastated, we're upset, we're sad,' Dan Dyess, a co-owner with his wife of the plantation resort, told The Times-Picayune | The Advocate. 'We put a lot of time, effort and money to developing this property.' Still, after the fire, some voices wryly expressed that all such sites should burn. Simultaneously, some white people wistfully mourned an irreplaceable architectural gem and moment in American — read Southern — grandeur and responded to the celebrations of the fire as an assault on their 'heritage,' the same way many responded in 2017 to the removal of Confederate monuments downriver in New Orleans. I'm not mourning in the same way that those embracing myths of the 'Lost Cause' and the idea of 'moonlight and magnolias' are, but I'm mourning the loss of another opportunity to teach about the history of enslavement. Our material history, including at places such as Nottoway, has messages for us. There are bricks where our ancestors' fingerprints remain, spiritual caches, crystals and sometimes lone cowrie shells reflecting traditional African beliefs. There are signs there of Islamic practices and practices of the early Black church. Even a rat's nest found in Charleston, South Carolina, had much to tell us about the past. It wasn't just a rat's nest; it had been fashioned from the pages from a 19th century speller. In the darkness, hidden from the enslavers' prying eyes, we were learning to read. The destruction of Nottoway isn't a trending story for me. I am a historical interpreter — not a re-enactor — and such places have been the focus of my research. I even wrote my award-winning memoir, 'The Cooking Gene,' tracing my ancestry from Africa to America, from enslavement to emancipation, using the story of African American food combined with the battle over how our history gets told and who gets to tell it. Many plantations, homes and living history sites are tied to colonial and antebellum slavery, both South and North. They have never been cheap to maintain or preserve, hence the need to bring in crowds that spend big. Sanitizing the brutality of slavery and promoting their properties as wedding venues is a way for those who operate such places to increase revenue. But their general refusal to confront the truth of history and balance their messaging, their willingness to bury the experiences of our ancestors underneath white supremacist propaganda, helps explain the glee many felt at Nottoway's destruction. I found it disheartening while doing research for 'The Cooking Gene' that one of my ancestors, Harry Townsend, who was sold as a child from North Carolina through Virginia to Alabama, had a bill of sale and a value for his body on the death of his slaveholder. He had run for freedom, and there was even a receipt for his return by a 'slave catcher.' But there's no record of my ancestor's grave, and most of land where he was enslaved is now underneath a mall. Places such as Nottoway that glorify the buildings that enslaved people built but ignore the pain and suffering those enslaved people experienced contribute to another kind of erasure. The New York Post quotes Dyess as saying, 'My wife and I had nothing to do with slavery but we recognize the wrongness of it. 'We are trying to make this a better place. We don't have any interest in left wing radical stuff. We we need to move forward on a positive note here and we are not going to dwell on past racial injustice.' If this fire was a message, it was a wake-up call. There are no perfect answers here. Nottoway could have gone the way of Whitney Plantation, also in Louisiana, which is a museum dedicated to helping visitors understand who the enslaved people were. I've been privileged to cook at Whitney Plantation, which is staffed by brilliant Black interpreters. Nottoway also could have been more like Magnolia Plantation in South Carolina, where my elder and teacher Joseph McGill raises awareness about chattel slavery. It could have been more like Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, where, as a consultant and scholar in residence, I learned from generations of people behind the site's African American programming. Coming to terms with what these plantations have meant is a process that takes time and generational commitment. Plantations and sites related to slavery have to have foot traffic and human and financial investment to preserve the evidence of African and African American labor, craft and resistance. Still, they shouldn't exist as mere resorts. We must stand in solidarity with museums (especially Black independent sites), genealogists, scholars, preservationists and descendants who do this recovery work. Their efforts to perform acts of sincere redemption and reconciliation are crucial. We can contribute to a more inclusive and accurate representation of our shared history by supporting such initiatives. This crossroads is the sacred ground where people of many backgrounds can and must meet. I can't think of a more critical time to speak the truth and acknowledge the humanity of enslaved Africans and Indigenous Americans and the flow of immigrants and others without whom we would not exist. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
07-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The Lost Cause factors into this North Carolina judge's refusal to admit defeat
Judge Jefferson Griffin, a Republican who lost his November race for the North Carolina Supreme Court, has created a scene by refusing to concede the race for five months, and recently a 2001 photo has surfaced of him wearing a Confederate uniform at a fraternity party when he was a student at the University of North Carolina. Griffin insists that the photo 'does not represent the person I am today.' If it's true that he no longer supports the Lost Cause, a mythology that glorifies the Confederates that attacked the Union, then he should also give up the lost cause of election subversion. Incumbent Justice Allison Riggs, the Democrat in the race, won the election by 734 votes, but by challenging 65,000 ballots that were cast in November, Griffin continues to try to whittle down the electorate after the fact to tip the race in his favor. A Friday ruling by a three-judge panel on the Republican-controlled appeals court — on which Griffin, who recused himself, sits — ruled in Griffin's favor. The panel decided 2-1 that the 65,000 voters whose eligibility Griffin challenges should have 15 business days to prove they were eligible to vote. But the North Carolina Supreme Court intervened Monday with a stay against the appeals court ruling. We hope it's more than a temporary pause and that the Republican majority on the state's highest court agrees with the judge who dissented from Friday's appeals court ruling. That dissenting judge argued that Friday's ruling amounts to 'changing the rules by which these lawful voters took part in our electoral process after the election to discard their otherwise valid votes,' and he rightly said that 'an attempt to alter the outcome of only one race among many on the ballot is directly counter to law, equity, and the Constitution.' If the appeals court ruling is allowed to stand, then some percentage of 65,000 North Carolina voters will have seen their vote erased. Confederates lost the Civil War, but as many historians of Reconstruction have noted, the South won the culture war. Consider that Griffin, then a college student, was proudly posing in Confederate grays 136 years after that side surrendered at Appomattox. While the particular myths of the Lost Cause have varied over the years, the motivation stays the same: Lies about the past are told to help people in power hold on to it in the present. Historic voter turnout in North Carolina in 2008 helped send Barack Obama to the White House, and since then the party that lost that race has been pushing the myth of 'voter fraud.' With the NC NAACP, a coalition of North Carolinians sued then-Gov. Pat McCrory to block the monster voter suppression law he signed in 2013. In federal court, we asked Republicans who claimed they were concerned about widespread voter fraud to produce evidence it existed. They could not then, and they cannot now. Voter fraud is the bogeyman they warn about to keep the Lost Cause alive today. I do not question Griffin's sincerity when he says he regrets wearing a Confederate uniform nearly a quarter century ago. He may also regret the Confederate flag his fraternity used to fly at its 'Old South' ball. They're symbols of another era. But they are symbols of a story that says Black Americans having political equality hurts white people. This is the story of the Lost Cause. It's a lie. When all the votes legally cast in North Carolina were counted last November, Griffin lost. He may not like that result, but that doesn't mean something nefarious happened. His ongoing challenge to North Carolinians' choice has become its own lost cause, deeply rooted in the tradition of myths that have kept some people re-enacting the Civil War for 160 years. For a court to rule in support of this challenge is to establish a precedent as dangerous as the Plessy v. Ferguson decision that propped up Jim Crow for almost 60 years. It's past time to hang up (literally and figuratively) the Confederate uniform and give up the belief system that drives Lost Cause thinking. North Carolina does better when more people vote. Any politician who doesn't acknowledge that can't be trusted to represent the will of the voters. Any judge who doesn't believe that cannot faithfully interpret our state or federal constitution. The moral foundations of 'we the people' are at stake in this attempt at election subversion. Each of us has a responsibility to stand against the lies that have kept the Lost Cause alive this long. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
02-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
In Brief: Bergeron advances on American Idol
Kedgwick singer Olivier Bergeron has punched his ticket to the next round on American Idol. Bergeron performed his interpretation of Jelly Roll's 'Lost Cause' live in front of judges Lionel Richie, Luke Bryan and Carrie Underwood. Despite the language barrier, they informed the truck driver that he is going to the next round in Hollywood. The next episodes air April 6 and April 7. 3×3 hockey coming soon The annual three-on-three Yves M Pelletier memorial hockey tournament at the Inch Arran Ice Palace is set for the Easter long weekend. All funds raised will go toward the Rod Harquail Fund to assist families with sick children with costs incurred for their treatment. Soccer registration open Registration for the upcoming summer soccer season for the Celtic Soccer Club in Campbellton is now open. There is an early bird special of $5 off registration fees for any player registering before April 20. The organization is also looking for summer students and volunteer coaches in most age groups. To register, visit Easter event April 18 Campbellton is organizing an afternoon of free Easter-themed activities for families on April 18, beginning at 2 p.m. at the Glencoe Community Centre. Recruitment fair April 26 The second annual volunteer recruitment fair is set for April 26. Various organizations and service clubs, as well as festival committees, will be at Alma Hall from 1 p.m. until 3 p.m. in hopes of attracting more volunteers to their organizations. To take part in the event or get more information, contact Melanie at Pool closed Friday Users of the pool at the Civic Centre are being reminded there will be no regular activities Friday and Saturday as the pool plays host to a swim meet. Everyone is invited to come watch the members of the local swim club compete. The pool is expected to reopen for regular use Sunday.
