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 "I’ll use the words of Jefferson Davis: ‘We just want to be left
alone,’” Charles Kelly Barrow said on Wednesday, quoting the man who
served as the president of the Confederate States of America during
the Civil War of 1861-65.
Barrow and about 1,000 members of his organization were in Richmond,
Virginia, this week for the 120th national reunion of the SCV,
formed in 1896 and open to male descendants of Confederate soldiers.
Richmond is the former capital city of the Confederacy.
The massacre at the Charleston church sparked a national debate over
the display of the Confederate flag and other symbols of the
pro-slavery Confederacy. Photos of the white suspect posing with the
flag have galvanized critics and led South Carolina to stop flying
it on the State House grounds.
"They want to remove our flags, the names on our streets, our
monuments," Barrow said in an interview, referring to pressure to
take down statues and rename streets named after Confederate heroes
such as Jefferson Davis.
"We're in a country that's supposed to be tolerant, and suddenly
they're targeting our culture," he said. "I can't wait to wake up
from this nightmare."
His comments followed a ceremony in Richmond's Hollywood Cemetery to
honor a Pennsylvania doctor who in the 1870s exhumed the remains of
thousands of Confederate soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg
and shipped them back to Southern states.
About 18,000 Confederate soldiers are buried in Hollywood, many of
them in an area called Gettysburg Hill, where small Confederate
flags fluttered among the tombstones.
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Davis, along with U.S. Presidents James Monroe and John Tyler, also
are buried in Hollywood.
Barrow said he had seen no protests at this year's convention, which
runs through the end of the week.
Following the South Carolina shootings, some of Richmond’s
Confederate monuments were defaced, and some people called for
taking down Confederate statuary along Monument Avenue, the city's
most famous thoroughfare.
Dwight Jones, its African-American mayor, disagrees and has instead
called for more monuments recognizing heroes from other eras. He
pointed to African-American tennis great Arthur Ashe’s statue on
Monument Avenue as a step in the right direction.
Last month, Democratic Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe called for
removing Confederate flags from state-issued license plates. Jones
and many other black officials applauded the decision.
(Editing by Frank McGurty and Eric Beech)
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