Foto do autor

Obras de Connor Towne O'Neill

Etiquetado

Conhecimento Comum

Data de nascimento
20th Century
Sexo
male
Nacionalidade
USA
Local de nascimento
Lancaster, PA, USA

Membros

Resenhas

Although I can usually count on the history/nonfiction books that I read to be excellent, I seem to have hit a patch where my choices don't quite live up to my expectations. In this case, a native Pennsylvanian gets his MFA at Alabama, then takes a job teaching at Auburn and decides to spend his time researching the differences of opinions that people have regarding the life and legacy of Nathan Bedford Forrest. To some, he was a hero of the confederacy, the Savior of Selma and the defender of a bygone way of life. To others, he was an uneducated hick who made millions buying and selling slaves, a Grand Wizards of the Ku Klux Klan, and the Butcher of Fort Pillow, whose troops slaughtered hundreds of black Union soldiers who were attempting to surrender. Now, 150 years after his death, Americans are still battling to either preserve or remove the countless statues plaques and memorials erected to him or to keep or rename the hundreds of schools, streets, parks and other edifices that bear his name.

If anyone picks picks this book and reads it hoping to find a great revelation that will resolve this conflict, they will be disappointed. The world we live in is not going to join hands and sing Kum ba yah as they gather by the river anytime soon. Everyone has an opinion about this and the author's attempts to present, as fairly as he can, every conflicting point of view, tended to get tedious, especially since almost everyone's arguments were essentially the same. One side believes the other is trying to erase our history while the other side claims that such monuments are a constant reminder of the oppression under which may Americans have always lived.

The part of this book that most impressed me was O'Neill's description of a memorial 'Service of Remembrance and Reconciliation,' held in a Memphis church in whose parking lot Forrest's slave pens once stood. The description of the service, and particularly the reading of the names and ages of seventy-eight known slaves who were held there and the profound impact that it had on the congregation did give me a glimmer of hope that reconciliation may indeed be possible.
Jerry, age thirty-five.
Charles, age forty-five.
Dick, age fourteen.
Paige, age nine.
Washington, age twenty.
Catherine, age twenty-three.
John Henry, age three.
Mary Ann, age three.
Bottom line: While I doubt that this book is going to change anyone's mind, it did give me a glimmer of hope when Memphis County Commissioner Van Turner, reminded us of Dr. King's words spoken on the steps of the Alabama state capitol after marching from Selma to Montgomery.
"The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice."
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Marcado
Unkletom | outras 6 resenhas | Jan 18, 2024 |
this is an excellent discussion of confederate statues and their real meaning, told mostly through the lens of a few monuments of nathan bedford forrest, and the struggles to have them removed/renamed. he does some personal reflecting, which is nice, and really delves into the meaning and white supremacy behind these monuments, and how impossible it is to get past our racist history when we don't acknowledge it, and when we mythologize and lionize the people who lived it. really well done.

"During the American Revolution, New Yorkers took down the statue of King George. After World War II, allied troops diligently removed Nazi symbolism from occupied Germany. After the battle of Baghdad in 2003, American Marines toppled the statue of Saddam Hussein. But after the American Civil War, statues of the losers started to go up instead. Why? Elodie Todd Dawson's work on Confederate Memorial Circle offers an answer. After the war, Elodie Todd Dawson, like so many women in the south, took up the burden of carrying on. Death had come for 1 in 5 of confederate soldiers, and for all three of Elodie's brothers....But Elodie's grief moved outward. She sought to make sense of the loss by enlisting as a foot soldier for The Lost Cause - the campaign of revisionist history that glorified the confederate soldier as a gallant knight who fought to protect his unimpeachable southern way of life. By emphasizing the valor of the soldier, the tragedy of his death, white southerners sidestepped the thornier questions of slavery and white supremacy as the Confederacy's raison d'être. Instead, cemetery's like Old Live Oak became ground zero for the magical thinking of the Lost Cause advocates, who emphasized the fact of the fighting, not its purpose or its consequence."

"In 1901, seven years after Turner's death, Alabamians gathered in Constitutional Convention, their explicit purpose, as Convention president John Knox put it, 'To establish white supremacy in this state. This is our problem and we should be permitted to deal with it, unobstructed by outside influences.'"

"The new constitution imposed poll taxes, property requirements, tests of literacy and constitutional knowledge, and other barriers to the franchise, which dropped the statewide number of black registered voters from more than 180,000 to less than 4,000, and in Dallas County, from 9,871 to 152, the latter a number that hardly wavered until the passage of the Voting Rights Act more than 60 years later."

"...America's conception of race has been the kneecapping of people of color in order for white people to feel tall. But claiming an identity based on a lie deranges you, so does winning a rigged game. Just look at how white people have reacted when confronted about the lie of their racial superiority in moments such as reconstruction in the civil rights movement - lynchings, night riding, terrorism, sociopathy. Instead of admitting the lie and working to establish a true democracy, white Americans consoled themselves with palliatives - Confederate flags during the civil rights movement, the Confederate monuments during Jim Crow, and made whiteness fungible, choosing to count the Irish and the Italians, say, as white, while coining markers such as quadroon and octaroon and 'one drop' to legislate blackness. Doing so eternally emphasizes some sort of 'not-blackness' at the core of American whiteness. Whiteness is a void, an emptiness, a lie on which Americans birthed and built a nation."

"The Emancipation Proclamation of Jan 1, 1863, in addition to freeing those in slavery in the rebelling states, also called for the enlistment of freedmen in the Union army. In response, the Confederacy passed a law that categorized all black soldiers as runaway slaves and called for Confederates to treat them with full and ample retaliation. Black soldiers fighting for the Union struck at the heart of their whole theory of white supremacy. White people have justified slavery by convincing themselves that black people were subhuman and thus better off, content even, under the rule of white masters. Former slaves, taking up arms against the Confederacy, flew in the face of everything they believed about their cause, about their way of life, and about themselves. As one Confederate put it, 'You cannot make soldiers of slaves or slaves of soldiers. The day you make a soldier of them is the beginning of the end of the revolution.'"
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Marcado
overlycriticalelisa | outras 6 resenhas | Jan 2, 2023 |
In Down Along with That Devil’s Bones, Connor Towne O’Neill examines the history of white supremacy as it relates to the Confederate monuments still present through the United States. While reporting on a story, he observed a gathering of people around the Confederate monument of Nathan Bedford Forrest. Seeing how passionate these southerners were for a statue of Forrest—the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan—but neglected to see the racism and injustice that he represented started O'Neill on a path to understand the place of Confederate monuments in today's America.
O'Neill's knowledge and analysis of the proliferation of Confederate monuments and memorials over 150 years after the Confederacy fell further convinced me of the constant presence of white supremacy that I was so willfully ignorant of for many years. I recommend this book as a great addition for those to trying to understand the legacy the Confederacy has for southerners.
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Marcado
Bibliophilly | Sep 21, 2021 |
This was an eye opening read because I had heard of Nathan Bedford Forrest but didn’t know much about him. It was fascinating how the author takes the story of activists trying to get this KKK grand wizard’s monuments down (and his supporters efforts to stop it from happening) across four different places, to give a scathing commentary on how all this discourse is more about people trying to cling onto their racist ideals rather than some perceived Southern heritage. He also gives some backstory about Forrest himself and how this slaveholder came to be such a popular figure in confederate America.

But ultimately it’s not completely a hopeful book despite being written brilliantly. The efforts of all the people trying to bring down these monuments is highly commendable but they do seem to be having many setbacks which is depressing; but more sad is the immense racial divisions and hate that exist, the willful ignorance regards to understanding actual history of the country, and not really having a clear idea how it can be solved. But that’s not the book’s fault and I definitely recommend the audiobook which is very well narrated.
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Marcado
ksahitya1987 | outras 6 resenhas | Aug 20, 2021 |

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Obras
2
Membros
92
Popularidade
#202,476
Avaliação
3.8
Resenhas
8
ISBNs
7

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