Trip through South shows how deep Confederacy is embedded in culture

VICKSBURG, Miss. — Slavery, Gordon Cotton explains, “did some good for some people.”

A white retired journalist, Cotton is propped on a stool in his cluttered kitchen, holding court before another black reporter and myself. We showed up unannounced at his home just off a dirt road in a heavily wooded area on the outskirts of this city in the Deep South.

His great-great-grandmother owned about 30 slaves, and “she provided nice little homes for them,” he says. “She provided clothing and food and medical care. She had one who made baskets, and she always bought his baskets.”

However society feels about slavery now, Cotton says, he won’t let it diminish his admiration for ancestors like his greatgreat-grandmother or spiritual forebears like Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president whom Cotton, 82, calls his hero.

“Looking back 150, 200 years ago, it was a way of life,” he says. “It may not have been right, but it was the way of life at the time.”

That personal connection to, and quick empathy for, the Old South has shaped Cotton’s view that Confederate monuments belong in the public square; that the Davises and Robert E. Lees of the world deserve to be honored, not shamed.

That belief, of course, is the source of a fierce debate, one that reached a violent climax in August 2017 when white supremacists, rallying against a proposal to remove a statue of Lee from a public park in Charlottesville, Virginia, clashed with counterdemonstrators. Heather Heyer, 32, was killed when a white supremacist plowed his car into a crowd.

The ugly episode aggravated the country’s frayed racial dynamic — even more so after President Donald Trump equated the counterprotesters with the white supremacists by blaming “many sides” for the violence.

A year later, public debate over Confederate iconography has quieted down. But have feelings really evolved? Are we any closer as a country to coming to terms with how to confront our shameful history, or are we quietly hurtling toward another eruption of violence?

I recently traveled through the South with Trymaine Lee, a MSNBC correspondent. Our trip took us through Virginia, Kentucky, Mississippi and Alabama.

We found that the legacy of the Confederacy has become so embedded in daily life that it will take more than the removal of a statue here or a plaque there to address it. To forget the atrocities that occurred on the serene plantations where you take prom pictures or walks with your family amid stone sculptures and bright flowers.

What’s left is a complicated calculus when it comes to finding common ground on the monument debate.

In some cases, the structures are simply too massive to remove — take the 351-foot obelisk honoring Davis in his birthplace of Fairview, Kentucky. In others, as in Alabama, a law has been established to prohibit the removal of Confederate monuments.

But in many instances, Confederate memorials are not physical. They are better understood as emotional, spiritual and familial connections.

Kitty Calhoun, who is white and a partner at a restaurant in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, said that she appreciates monuments like the obelisk for their artistic beauty, not their negative symbolism.

“I don’t try to think about the representation,” says Calhoun, 68. Rather, she adds, it is “the history that’s behind it, as far as it being there, how long it’s been there, is more what I’m into.”

But ignoring the misdeeds of Confederate leaders — seeing Davis the statesman without seeing Davis the slave owner — is not a luxury available to black people.

“We have to understand him from a very broad perspective,” Bertram Hayes-Davis says of his great-great-grandfather, Jefferson Davis.

Hayes-Davis, 69, is a living, breathing monument to his great-greatgrandfather. When I met him at his home in Vicksburg, he was loose and inviting.

Hayes-Davis’ life’s mis- sion is to prevent people — whether pro- or anti-Confederate — from reducing his great-greatgrandfather’s legacy to his time as president of the Confederacy.

He believes that racists have hijacked Confederate symbols in an effort to deepen the country’s racial divide.

While he says that people who support the removal of monuments are often misguided, Hayes-Davis also agrees that, if a statue offends someone, it should be moved to a private area where it could be used for teaching.

He is unafraid to point out Davis’ flaws — “Was he a white supremacist? Yes, he was,” Hayes-Davis says, always adding that he was so much more.

Toya Sarno Jordan / New York Times Trymaine Lee (left) of MSNBC and John Eligon of the Times traveled through the South to explore the roots of the nation’s divide over its Civil War past.

Kitty Calhoun, a descendant of John C. Calhoun, and Bertram Hayes-Davis, a descendant of Jefferson Davis, reflect on their heritage.