Kusaimamekirai’s Reviews > Gettysburg 1963: Civil Rights, Cold War Politics, and Historical Memory in America's Most Famous Small Town > Status Update

Klansmen in 1966 wanted to march from the Mississippi state monument at Gettysburg to protest James Meredith’s March Against Fear. Only problem, Mississippi didn’t have a monument there in 1966.
“A small group of robed Klansmen wandered around the battlefield searching for the nonexistent monument. Ultimately the group gave up on finding it and marched out of town brandishing a Confederate flag”
Idiots…

“Marian Anderson’s long symbolic association with Abraham Lincoln and the emancipationist vision of the Civil War began in 1939, when she performed an outdoor concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial after being barred by the Daughters of the American Revolution from using their concert venue”

Some on the Gettysburg commencement committee wanted to stage mock military executions as part of the day’s events to show tourists the effect these had on everyday soldiers. Thankfully, they were talked out of it.

It’s disappointing that most of the (halfhearted) initiatives aimed at ending racial discrimination during the Cold War were adopted not for moral reasons but instead because it hurt the image of the U.S. in the eyes of the world. When Kennedy criticized protestors for hurting America’s good name someone aptly responded: ‘I can’t drag something through the mud that already been there for a long time”

George Wallace speaking at a Gettysburg commemoration shouldn’t ever be a thing. That he was according to reports also the most popular governor in attendance with crowds is just…

“While many lionized the armies of 1863 for fighting for ‘a cause in which they believed’, none attempted to define that cause, testimony to the enduring power of white reconciliation in the popular mind”

At “the (1961) ceremony for the 1st state monument dedicated at Gettysburg in more than 30 years (and the 4th erected by a formerly Confederate state)…the band played both the Star Spangled Banner and Dixie. UDC leaders led the group in two pledges of allegiance, the 1st to the American flag and the 2nd to the First National Flag of the Confederacy”
Hell no. Not at all ok with Dixie being sung at Gettysburg.

It’s crazy to me that even as late as the 1960’s, local, state, and federal officials were unwilling to make Gettysburg the center of Civil War centennial commemorations out of fear of upsetting white Southerners.
It’s ironic in that the Civil War erupted essentially because the North and Lincoln finally decided to not let themselves be held hostage to constant Southern ultimatums about slavery

Civil Rights, the Civil War, and the Cold War in one book. It’s like my birthday and Christmas all wrapped into one.