During the 1920s, T.C. Williams's father purchased some lots surrounding the family's modest home in Suffolk, Virginia. The youngest of eight children, Williams, now 82, is a true Suffolkian -- a term longtime residents of this city, sandwiched between the James River and the North Carolina border, use with pride. But Williams, who is black, did not grow up in downtown Suffolk. Outside the city, past where the pavement ended, past where the lighting dimmed, and then another 15 minutes by foot -- that was where the Williams family lived. "Suffolk to me -- now that I'm able to compare -- was like Johannesburg," he says. His community was like Soweto.
As a youngster, he played on the lots his father had purchased,kicking around the scores of metallic gray balls he found in a ditch on theproperty. It was only in the early 1980s that Williams -- who had been snatchedfrom Suffolk by the draft, worked in New York City for the U.S. Postal Service,and then returned to his hometown for good in 1977 -- found himself in aRichmond museum, about an hour northwest of Suffolk, staring at a collection ofgray Civil War bullets that looked awfully familiar. "Had I not seen those piecesin this museum, the thought would never have occurred to me," he says. Williamshad spent part of his childhood unwittingly at play in a ditch full of bulletsonce used by soldiers.
The Civil War is as inescapable in Suffolk today as it was in the rural lotsof Williams's youth -- and this April more than ever. The city of 67,000residents -- about half black, half white -- recently became the latest ofabout a dozen Virginia municipalities to recognize April as Confederate Historyand Heritage Month, acting at the request of the local chapter of the Sons ofConfederate Veterans (SCV), known as Tom Smith Camp #1702. What makes Suffolkunusual is that the city's mayor, Curtis Milteer -- whose prerogative it is toapprove or reject such proclamations -- is black.
No one was more dismayed by Milteer's decision to sign the proclamation thanCharles Christian, president of Suffolk's NAACP chapter. The morning after thestory broke in the Suffolk News-Herald, Milteer paid a visit to Christian at home to try to assuage concerns about what he had done. Milteer told Christian that while considering the proclamation, he had spent time researching at a local public library and decided that slavery had not been the defining issue of the Civil War. The NAACP leader was unimpressed. "That was just too little too late," he says of the mayor's house call. Christian's manner of complaint -- he believes the mayor's decision will detract from Suffolk's sense of "togetherness" -- is understated and polite. But it belies his profound disappointment over what has taken place in his hometown.
Two days later came a Wednesday city council meeting that was, by Suffolkstandards, boisterous. Members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans showed up inforce and their leaders, one by one, rose to praise Milteer for his decision.Katherine Hamilton, a descendant of local black Confederate soldier Jason Boone,rose to defend the mayor's choice. Christian spoke against the proclamation.
By the time I arrived in town on Sunday, Suffolk seemed to have officiallyreverted to sleepy. The front page of the News-Herald was dominated by a picture of a four-year-old catching a fish and a feature story about two local officers riding their bikes in the Police Unity Tour. Suffolkians I interviewed said the debate over Confederate History Month had been contentious but that the controversy was blowing over -- or would blow over just as soon as people like me were no longer interested, as one longtime resident congenially explained.
Main Street was quiet on Sunday afternoon. Though Suffolk's population issizeable, it is spread over 430 square miles, giving the city a small-town feel.Downtown consists of about five gentrifying blocks. The Nansemond River cuts toone side of town. It isn't much of a river, but its shores technically count as awaterfront, and there are plans to construct a Hilton alongside it. East of MainStreet lies a massive Planters peanut factory. The historically blackneighborhood surrounding the factory is depressing, decrepit, and still largelyblack.
Two long blocks from Main Street -- just on the other side of well-keptCedar Hill Cemetery -- is the Dining Room, a favorite restaurant of the Sons ofConfederate Veterans. The restaurant, like the politics of the SCV members whofrequent it, lies just on the outskirts of Suffolk's center. I arranged to meetmembers of the group for dinner on a Tuesday night. "Bring your gun," onetownsperson advised me jovially before I set off. Another rolled her eyesnervously and said I would meet some "interesting" folks.
I arrived at the Dining Room 10 minutes early, expecting to be the firstthere. Instead, the former commander of the Tom Smith Camp, F. Lee Hart III,greeted me at the door. Already seated at a table in the corner were two otherSCV members and one of their wives, a member of the United Daughters of theConfederacy. They wasted no time. Clearly distrustful of my motives for visitingSuffolk, they nevertheless launched into stories of their recent triumphs, suchas last year's restoration of Suffolk's Confederate memorial, which theirorganization sponsored. These tales morphed seamlessly into stories of southernbattlefield valor circa 1865.
But if the boundary between past and present seems unusually porous for theSons of Confederate Veterans, the group's agenda focuses squarely on the here andnow. "Throughout our history, I would say the organization has always functionedin a quiet, passive manner," says Bill Richardson, the group's commander. But nolonger. "We're taking a much stronger role in defending the good name of theConfederate soldier," he explains. What that means in practical terms is that theSons of Confederate Veterans is increasingly determined to push its view that theSouth was right during the "second American revolution" -- the preferred termfor the Civil War in this company -- at every opportunity and without apology.So when members learned in March that Virginia Governor Mark Warner had declinedto renew the long-standing tradition of naming April Confederate History Month,they took matters into their own hands, submitting a proclamation for MayorMilteer's approval.
"I didn't in my mind have any reservations that it would not be signed,"Richardson says. Of Milteer, Hart says, "He has a lot of common sense. He's agood man; he's a Suffolk man." Later in the dinner Hart explains further: "Theproblem is not with black people, the problem is with white liberals who areintimidated by the NAACP," he says. "If we just had to deal with the blacksalone, I don't think we'd have any problem." And yet Hart does not hesitate tocriticize black leaders for worrying about issues such as Confederate HistoryMonth while their people are "on the streets killing each other for drugs."
Suffolk's Sons of Confederate Veterans have been here before -- as recently as a year ago, when they paid to have an enormous Confederate flagprofessionally restored and placed in Riddick's Folly, a historic home indowntown Suffolk that operates as a sort of museum of the town's history. But thebuilding receives money from the city, and the board of Riddick's Folly initiallyrejected the flag, citing insensitivity to black residents. Ultimately, the Sonsof Confederate Veterans scored a mixed victory: They persuaded the board toreverse itself and accept the gift, but the framed flag proved too big to fitthrough the doorway of the third-floor room it was to occupy. The six-foot bysix-foot flag rested in the building's third-floor hallway for weeks. Defeat waseventually conceded, and the flag was relocated to a local establishment calledSouthern Gun Works. The episode was a dry run for the controversy overConfederate History Month.
About halfway through dinner, Hart asks if I have heard of the Battleof New Market, which took place on May 15, 1864. General John Breckenridge of theConfederacy, ordered to save the Shenandoah Valley from Union forces, foundhimself short of manpower and reluctantly called up cadets from the VirginiaMilitary Institute. At a crucial moment in the battle, the cadets, mostlyteenagers, charged and held their position, swinging momentum to the Confederacy.Ten were killed. The valley was saved. At this point in the story, Hart's voicebegins to crack. His eyes well with tears. He apologizes: He can't go on. It isthe second time during our dinner that Hart has become choked up over Civil Warbattles. He is wearing a Confederate tie. He sports a Confederate wristwatch. Andnow he is verklempt.
Fortunately, there is a lot to be said about the crimes of cruel fate againstthe southern people, and my other dinner companions are more than happy to pickup where Hart leaves off. For if the Sons of Confederate Veterans have anunusually vivid sense of history, they have an equally well-developed persecutioncomplex. "We are now the ones in the minority and finding our civil rightstrampled," Richardson says. Like members of any oppressed group, they aredetermined to reclaim their identity. "I had to go to the doctor about a yearago, and you had to put your race on a little form," he recalls with the evidentpride of someone who has beaten the system at its own game. "And I put 'SouthernConfederate.'"
In fact, the Sons of Confederate Veterans are fond of turning the rhetoric ofthe relativist left in on itself -- and using it skillfully to decidedlynonliberal ends. "In this era of mutual respect and social healing," Richardsonasks, "how can everyone come together to be homogenous when the only people whocan come together to celebrate their history are those people?" (He is referringto blacks.) "We all have a unique heritage, and we have more similarities than wedo differences," Fred Taylor, the group's lieutenant commander, says ofsoutherners. "Our strength is our diversity," Richardson adds. It was an argumentthe group had offered to great effect at the council meeting six nights before.
By all indications, it was this deployment of multiculturalism gone awry thatconvinced Mayor Milteer to sign the proclamation. The mayor did not respond tomessages left at his home. A woman at city hall told me he was no longeranswering questions about this issue. But before he stopped talking to the press,Milteer said something very revealing to the News-Herald: "We have rendered proclamations for other groups," he said. "It's a matter of recognizing and respecting everyone's heritage, even if it is not the same as our own."
This argument appears to have carried weight with some in Suffolk -- wheremany citizens, particularly whites, seem to make little distinction betweenremembering history and celebrating it. "Anybody who has read the proclamation inits entirety and fully understands what it means -- I don't see how they couldhave problems," says Robin Rountree, speaking as a private citizen though she isalso the director of Riddick's Folly. "It's part of our history. You can't denythat."
But you don't, of course, have to honor it -- and that is where councilmanThomas Woodward draws the line. Woodward, who is white, incurred the ire of theSons of Confederate Veterans at the Wednesday council meeting by publicly statinghis opposition to Milteer's decision. As a result, he's a little self-consciousabout his newfound stature as a local champion of civil rights -- and he spendsmost of our interview trying to correct it. "I am no one's liberal," he says. "Ihave never voted for a Democrat in my entire life and don't intend to do so."Twice he tells me -- out of nowhere -- how much he hates Morris Dees of theSouthern Poverty Law Center. I tell him my magazine is center-left; he introducesme to the city manager as a socialist. "I'm no supporter of Black History Month,"he reminds me. Robert E. Lee is one of his heroes -- and so on.
But beyond the good-ol'-boy bluster, there is something admirable aboutWoodward's decision to draw a distinction that other white Suffolkians seemunwilling to invoke. "I think people should remember history," he says, "but notworship history." Then he adds, "At the end of the war, Lee told his troops, 'Gohome.' And that should have been the end of it."
T.C. Williams agrees. He doesn't think much of Mayor Milteer -- "Little mandoing a big job," he says bluntly -- but his attitude toward the Sons ofConfederate Veterans is more one of puzzlement than anything else. He tells me hewill never understand their pseudoreligious obsession with the battles anddefeats of centuries gone by. "You lost it and you lost big," he says of the warwhose legacy has proven even more durable than the discarded bullets of hisinnocent youth. "Now let's get on with it."
But not for Suffolk, and not anytime soon if the Sons of Confederate Veteranshave their way. They are on the move -- sponsoring essay contests about theConfederacy in public schools, dressing up in Confederate garb, and telling"romantic stories of Jeb Stuart," among other tales, to local schoolchildren.Like all good missionaries, they are even taking their message abroad; they claimtheir Confederate stickers have been distributed as far away as Russia and theUkraine. They are busily rewriting Suffolk's understanding of the Civil War,explaining that the "Underground Railroad was kind of a publicity stunt" and thatthe conflict was a theological struggle between the Christian forces of good andthe secular forces of evil, rather than a fight over slavery. "We are no longerin an attitude to remain passive about our heritage," says Richardson of what hisgroup is doing. They are bullish on the future -- which is to say the past.Having won themselves a month in Suffolk, they are aiming for the year.
