Rebel yell: Southern nationalists crying ‘secede’
BIRMINGHAM, ALA. » As 21st century activists seek to topple monuments to the 19th century Confederate rebellion, some white Southerners are again advocating for what the Confederates tried and failed to do: secede from the Union.
It’s not an easy argument to win, and it’s not clear how much support the idea has: The leading Southern nationalist group, the Alabamabased League of the South, has been making the same claim for more than two decades and still has an address in the U.S.A., not the C.S.A.
But the idea of a breakaway Southern nation persists.
The League of the South’s longtime president, retired university professor Michael Hill of Killen, Alabama, posted a message in July that began, “Fight or die white man” and went on to say Southern nationalists seek “nothing less than the complete reconquest and restoration of our patrimony — the whole, entire South.”
“And that means the South will once again be in name and in actuality White Man’s Land. A place where we and our progeny can enjoy Christian liberty and the fruits of our own labor, unhindered by parasitical ‘out groups,’” said Hill’s message, posted on the group’s Facebook page a day after a rally in support of a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia.
The group’s website says it is “waging a war to win the minds and hearts of the Southern people,”
While white-controlled government is its goal, the group says in a statement of beliefs that it offers “good will and cooperation to Southern blacks in areas where we can work together as Christians to make life better for all people in the South.”
According to the U.S. Census, 55 percent of the nation’s black population lived in the South in 2010, and 105 Southern counties had a black population of 50 percent or higher.
Hill said they’re not advocating for a repeat of a Civil War that claimed 620,000 lives or a return to slavery, the lynchpin of the South’s antebellum economy.
“We have no interest in going back and recreating an un-recreatable past,” Hill said in a telephone interview. “We are future oriented.”
The group has erected billboards that said “SECEDE” in several states, and it even has its own banner — a black and white version of the familiar Confederate battle flag, minus the stars.
Secession also finds support on some websites that support white nationalism, including Occidental Dissent, run by a Hill associate, and the openly racist, anti-Semitic Daily Stormer. Extremist watchdog Heidi Beirich said strict Southern nationalism seems to have been swept up into the larger white-power agenda in recent years.
“I think it’s mostly subsumed into the white nationalist movement,” said Beirich, director of the Intelligence Project at the Southern Poverty Law Center. “There might be a little Southern softness to it. But I can’t tell a whole lot of difference between the League and white nationalism.”
Meanwhile, critics are howling over the mere idea that HBO is considering a dramatic series based on the idea that the South really did secede again and slavery still existed.
But secession isn’t the sole property of Southern white nationalists.
A group that wants California to secede from the United States is based mainly on liberals wanting to exit the United States because of President Donald Trump’s election. They are collecting signatures to place a secession ballot initiative on the 2018 ballot.