(01-05-2018 01:34 PM)Lord Stanley Wrote:  

Quote:Uncivil,” an excellent new podcast about the Civil War hosted by Jack Hitt and Chenjerai Kumanyika, begins with a visit this summer to a controversial statue. It doesn’t involve Robert E. Lee or the Confederate flag, they tell us: it’s the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, D.C., which was put up in 1876.

Abraham Lincoln stands about twenty feet tall, impeccably dressed, his hand extended. Beneath him is a black man on his knees, naked but for a loincloth, a broken shackle on his arm. He looks almost as if he might be “shining Lincoln’s shoes,” Kumanyika tells us. “Lincoln is still standing over the dude.” The statue doesn’t give black people “any credit or represent the agency of black people in freeing themselves,”

Quote:“One of the things that also gets covered up is really just all stories of African-American agency in the war,” Hitt told me. The traditional narrative, he said, tends to be that enslaved people “sat on the fields waiting for the nice white Yankees to come down and tell them they were free to go.”

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/podcas...-in-school

http://uncivil.show/

Anyone with a real understanding of the Civil War knows slaves fled the plantations in huge numbers to get to Union lines and many served as unofficial scouts for the Union before they were permitted to enlist.