Politics

Black Backer of Confederate Flag Was Anomaly in Mississippi

Published

9 years ago

July 22, 2015

In this May 8, 2000, file photograph, Anthony Hervey holds a Confederate flag while standing underneath the Confederate monument in Oxford, Miss. The Highway Patrol says 49-year-old Hervey was killed Sunday, July 19, 2015, when his 2005 Ford Explorer left the roadway and overturned on Mississippi Highway 6 in Lafayette County. (Bruce Newman/The Oxford Eagle via AP, File)

EMILY WAGSTER PETTUS, Associated Press

OXFORD, Miss. (AP) — In a town where Confederate soldier statues stand sentinel on the courthouse square and a university campus, Anthony Hervey remained an anomaly — a black man who draped himself in the Confederate battle flag and publicly declared his loyalty to the secessionist Lost Cause and his belief that the Civil War was not fought over slavery.

Hervey, 49, died Sunday when the sport utility vehicle he was driving flipped into a ditch beside Mississippi Highway 6 near Oxford. He and another black Confederate supporter were returning home after speaking at an event to support a Confederate monument in Birmingham, Alabama.

The passenger, Arlene Barnum of Stuart, Oklahoma, survived and told The Associated Press that Hervey lost control of her vehicle after they were chased by a silver or gray sedan carrying four or five black men.

The Mississippi Highway Patrol is interviewing witnesses and reconstructing the crash, said patrol spokesman Johnny Poulos. The local coroner, Rocky Kennedy, said Tuesday that he was waiting for autopsy results.

Hervey was well known in Oxford and at the University of Mississippi, where students waved Confederate flags for decades to cheer the Rebels.

In Hervey’s 2006 book, “Why I Wave the Confederate Flag, Written by a Black Man,” he said the Civil War was not fought over slavery and that he was supporting black soldiers who fought for the South in the Civil War.

Even people who had known Hervey for years say they didn’t always understand him.

Randal McJunkins, 47, said he and Hervey had known each other since they were Oxford High School students in the 1980s and they had played basketball together in recent years. McJunkins called Hervey by his nickname Tony, and described him as smart and opinionated.

“He was different, I can say that,” McJunkins said. “If you knew him, you knew what to say to him, what not to say to him.”

McJunkins, who is black, recalled seeing Hervey around Oxford wearing a Confederate uniform and waving a flag. Several years ago, Hervey walked about 25 miles from Oxford to Batesville carrying a large rebel flag.

“I always wanted to ask him, what was the deal with that,” McJunkins said Monday.

In 2000 and 2001, Hervey made several appearances around Mississippi, speaking against a proposal to remove the Confederate battle emblem that has been on the state flag since Reconstruction. State voters decided in 2001 to keep the flag design, but now some people are saying the issue should be reconsidered.

Barnum said organizers of Saturday’s Alabama event had asked her to give Hervey a ride there. She said she didn’t know him previously.

Barnum and Hervey both spoke at the rally, and Barnum said she burned an NAACP membership card during her speech. A video shows the crowd cheered when Hervey said he doesn’t like black people or white people, “but I love me some Southerners.”

The public display of Confederate symbols has come under fresh scrutiny since the June 17 massacre of nine black worshippers at a church in Charleston, South Carolina. The white man charged in the killings had posed with a Confederate battle flag in photos posted online before the attack.

At the Alabama rally, Hervey called attempts to remove Confederate symbols and monuments “an assault on working-class people.”

Hervey also said: “You know what white guilt is? If I can accuse you of something you ain’t have nothing to do with, and I do it long enough and I put on ‘Twelve Years a Slave’ and ‘Mississippi Burning,’ I program your children. This is where the racism comes in, that white guilt.”

Barnum said that as she and Hervey were traveling home Sunday, she let Hervey drive. She said he stopped at a convenience store, and she remained in the vehicle as he went in. She said Hervey was wearing a Confederate kepi, or military hat. Barnum said soon after they left the store, a car with four or five young black men pulled up near them.

“They were angry with Mr. Hervey,” Barnum said. “Mr. Hervey sped up and said, ‘Hell, no.’ … He really had to gun it on the gas pedal.”

Barnum said Hervey didn’t have time to explain what was happening. “I could have sworn that they knew him because of his reaction to them,” she said.

She said the car ran Hervey off the highway, and the SUV rolled over. Barnum said she unbuckled herself and told Hervey he should take a pocket knife off her key chain and cut his seatbelt. She said he was breathing but didn’t respond.

Hervey died at the scene. Funeral arrangements had not been made by Tuesday.

___

Follow Emily Wagster Pettus on Twitter: http://twitter.com/EWagsterPettus.

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Activism

U.S. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries Speaks on Democracy at Commonwealth Club

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages. Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Published

10 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

: House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries at the Commonwealth Club World Affairs Council on Dec. 2. Photo by Johnnie Burrell. Book cover: "The ABCs of Democracy" by Hakeem Jeffries.

By Linda Parker Pennington
Special to The Post

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries addressed an enthusiastic overflow audience on Monday at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club, launching his first book, “The ABCs of Democracy.”

Based on his first speech as House minority leader, “The ABCs of Democracy” by Grand Central Publishing is an illustrated children’s book for people of all ages.

Each letter contrasts what democracy is and isn’t, as in: “American Values over Autocracy”, “Benevolence over Bigotry” and “The Constitution over the Cult.”

Less than a month after the election that will return Donald Trump to the White House, Rep. Jeffries also gave a sobering assessment of what the Democrats learned.

“Our message just wasn’t connecting with the real struggles of the American people,” Jeffries said. “The party in power is the one that will always pay the price.”

On dealing with Trump, Jeffries warned, “We can’t fall into the trap of being outraged every day at what Trump does. That’s just part of his strategy. Remaining calm in the face of turmoil is a choice.”

He pointed out that the razor-thin margin that Republicans now hold in the House is the lowest since the Civil War.

Asked what the public can do, Jeffries spoke about the importance of being “appropriately engaged. Democracy is not on autopilot. It takes a citizenry to hold politicians accountable and a new generation of young people to come forward and serve in public office.”

With a Republican-led White House, Senate, House and Supreme Court, Democrats must “work to find bi-partisan common ground and push back against far-right extremism.”

He also described how he is shaping his own leadership style while his mentor, Speaker-Emeritus Nancy Pelosi, continues to represent San Francisco in Congress. “She says she is not hanging around to be like the mother-in-law in the kitchen, saying ‘my son likes his spaghetti sauce this way, not that way.’”

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MacArthur Fellow Dorothy Roberts’ Advocates Restructure of Child Welfare System

Roberts’s early work focused on Black women’s reproductive rights and their fight for reproductive justice. In “Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty 1997)”, she analyzes historical and contemporary policies and practices that denied agency to Black women and sought to control their childbearing—from forced procreation during slavery, to coercive sterilization and welfare reform—and advocates for an expanded understanding of reproductive freedom.

Published

10 hours ago

December 22, 2024

Oakland Post

Dorothy Roberts. Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

Special to The Post

When grants were announced Oct. 1, it was noted that eight of the 22 MacArthur Fellows were African American. Among the recipients of the so-called ‘genius grants’ are scholars, visual and media artists a poet/writer, historian, and dancer/choreographer who each receive $800,000 over a five-year period to spend as they see fit.

Their names are Ruha Benjamin, Jericho Brown, Tony Cokes, Jennifer L. Morgan, Ebony G. Patterson, Shamel Pitts, Jason Reynolds, and Dorothy Roberts. This is the eighth and last in the series highlighting the Black awardees. The report below on Dorothy Roberts is excerpted from the MacArthur Fellows web site.

A graduate of Yale University with a law degree from Harvard, Dorothy Roberts is a legal scholar and public policy researcher exposing racial inequities embedded within health and social service systems.

Sine 2012, she has been a professor of Law and Sociology, and on the faculty in the department of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Roberts’s work encompasses reproductive health, bioethics, and child welfare. She sheds light on systemic inequities, amplifies the voices of those directly affected, and boldly calls for wholesale transformation of existing systems.

This work prompted Roberts to examine the treatment of children of color in the U.S. child welfare system.

After nearly two decades of research and advocacy work alongside parents, social workers, family defense lawyers, and organizations, Roberts has concluded that the current child welfare system is in fact a system of family policing with alarmingly unequal practices and outcomes. Her 2001 book, “Shattered Bonds: The Color of Child Welfare,” details the outsized role that race and class play in determining who is subject to state intervention and the results of those interventions.

Through interviews with Chicago mothers who had interacted with Child Protective Services (CPS), Roberts shows that institutions regularly punish the effects of poverty as neglect.

CPS disproportionately investigates Black and Indigenous families, especially if they are low-income, and children from these families are much more likely than white children to be removed from their families after CPS referral.

In “Torn Apart: How the Child Welfare System Destroys Black Families—and How Abolition Can Build a Safer World (2022),” Roberts traces the historical, cultural, and political forces driving the racial and class imbalance in child welfare interventions.

These include stereotypes about Black parents as negligent, devaluation of Black family bonds, and stigmatization of parenting practices that fall outside a narrow set of norms.

She also shows that blaming marginalized individuals for structural problems, while ignoring the historical roots of economic and social inequality, fails families and communities.

Roberts argues that the engrained oppressive features of the current system render it beyond repair. She calls for creating an entirely new approach focused on supporting families rather than punishing them.

Her support for dismantling the current child welfare system is unsettling to some. Still, her provocation inspires many to think more critically about its poor track record and harmful design.

By uncovering the complex forces underlying social systems and institutions, and uplifting the experiences of people caught up in them, Roberts creates opportunities to imagine and build more equitable and responsive ways to ensure child and family safety.