Posted: Wednesday, September 2, 2015 11:36 am
By JUDGE MARTIN F. CLARK JR. Special to the Bulletin
On August 19, 2015, I personally removed General J. E. B. Stuart’s portrait from the Patrick County Circuit Court’s courtroom.
This will no doubt anger, perplex and disappoint many residents of our county, perhaps even the majority of people who live here. It will be an unpopular decision in many quarters, especially given that the courthouse is located in a town named in Stuart’s honor. Still, it is my goal—and my duty as a judge—to provide a trial setting that is perceived by all participants as fair, neutral and without so much as a hint of prejudice. Confederate symbols are, simply put, offensive to African Americans, and this reaction is based on fact and clear, straightforward history. Bigotry saturates the Confederacy’s founding principles, its racial aspirations and its public pronouncements. For instance, the Declarations of Causes—the legal and philosophical grounds recited by the Southern states for leaving the Union—could just as easily be called The South’s Demands to Mistreat Black People. South Carolina, according to its declaration, felt wronged because of “an increasing hostility on the part of non-slaveholding states to the institution of slavery,” and, ironically, complained that the federal government had “denounced as sinful the institution of slavery” ...
I have heard from several of my local friends that people — like myself — who are critical of Confederate symbols need “to read the real history.” I have ... I’ve read how Confederate flags waived in the galleries after the Virginia legislature passed its racist, embarrassing and unconstitutional Massive Resistance scheme. When George Wallace proclaimed “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever,” he invoked Jefferson Davis, the “Cradle of the Confederacy” and the “great Anglo-Saxon Southland” ... There’s only one “real” history. No group or person has somehow perverted, hijacked or misstated what Confederate emblems represent. From the creation of the Confederacy straight through until today, from Alexander Stephens to Harry Byrd to George Wallace to David Duke, these symbols have always been imbued with the conviction of black inferiority ...
... I’m weary of the argument that we shouldn’t remove certain intrusive Civil War symbols because “everybody’s too sensitive and/or everybody is offended by something.” Black men and women have a bona fide, objective, fact-based, historically grounded reason to find Confederate glorification offensive, and almost all of them do in fact take offense ...
http://www.martinsvillebulletin.com/news/full-statement-from-judge-martin-clark/article_64b4324e-5188-11e5-ab3f-ebd59f1b26bf.html
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