Happy Robert E. Lee Day!

Every state celebrates Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but not every 
state celebrates it the same way. In New Hampshire, King’s 
birthday is “Martin Luther King Jr. Civil Rights Day,” an 
explicit celebration of the entire civil rights movement (and a 
compromise with lawmakers who didn’t want a day devoted to King 
alone). In Idaho, it’s “Martin Luther King, Jr.–Idaho Human 
Rights Day,” a celebration of justice writ large. And in three 
states—Alabama, Arkansas, and Mississippi—MLK Day is also Robert 
E. Lee Day.

This isn’t a different Robert E. Lee—some forgotten crusader for 
human equality. No, this is the Gen. Robert E. Lee who led 
Confederate armies in war against the United States, who 
defended a nation built on the “great truth” that the “negro is 
not equal to the white man,” and whose armies kidnapped and sold 
free black Americans whenever they had the opportunity.

Despite his betrayal of the Union (a stark contrast to fellow 
Virginian Winfield Scott, who refused to join the Confederacy) 
and his treatment of enslaved black Americans—as a slavedriver, 
he sold children and oversaw brutal punishments, including 
sewing brine into the wounds of returned fugitives—Lee’s popular 
image is of an honorable and decent man who fought well and 
loathed slavery. (The former is debatable and the latter is 
true, in that Lee thought slaveholding a burdensome occupation.)

There are three other states that commemorate the life of Lee: 
Georgia, Florida, and Virginia. The difference is that their 
celebrations are all separate from MLK Day, if only by a few 
days: Virginia’s Robert E. Lee Day was this past Friday.

In fairness, Lee Day isn’t a recent invention. The general’s 
birthday falls on Jan. 19, and the first official commemoration 
was marked by the Virginia legislature in 1889, a decade after 
the end of Reconstruction and well into the period of racial 
regression, when Southern state legislatures dismantled efforts 
at biracial education, imposed Jim Crow, and turned a blind eye 
to anti-black terrorism. And in 1904, Robert E. Lee Day became 
“Lee-Jackson Day” after Virginia added Confederate Gen. Thomas 
“Stonewall” Jackson to the holiday.

All of this raises an obvious question: How did Lee get tangled 
up in our national commemoration of Martin Luther King Jr. and 
the civil rights movement? The best answer is convenience. In 
states that commemorated Lee, lawmakers who approved of MLK Day 
didn’t want to create two holidays in January. Instead, they 
combined the two days. As a concept, it was a poor pairing. As a 
bureaucratic solution, it worked.

But over the next two decades, under pressure from civil rights 
groups, several states would either end their Lee commemorations 
or move them to a different day. In 2000, pushed by Republican 
Gov. Jim Gilmore, Virginia would end the state’s “Lee-Jackson-
King Day” and reserve the third Monday of January for the civil 
rights leader.

It should be said that the “Lee” part of “Lee-King Day” is 
mostly downplayed in states that have the holiday. Outside of a 
few towns and counties, there aren’t any public events in honor 
of Lee’s memory. The general, a symbol of the white South—or at 
least, a version of it—exists in quiet tension with King, a 
symbol of a more modern, integrated South. Still, it’s not hard 
to find some commemoration of Lee, who continues to capture 
Southern imaginations. “If the image of Lee changes in history, 
the man himself did not, even in the face of the greatest 
provocations,” writes Paul Greenberg for the Arkansas-Democrat 
Gazette in its annual editorial on the life of Lee, “His 
victories were great, but his honor greater.”

As a Virginian, I understand the drive to praise Lee. His honor 
is an undeniable and worthy quality. But we shouldn’t forget 
what Lee fought for. Not for freedom or for liberty, but for 
perpetual bondage and a South that forever held its black 
citizens as slaves and servants. And while Lee spent the post-
war period as an advocate for reconciliation, he also opposed 
the nascent moves toward racial egalitarianism, condemning black 
suffrage, even as many black leaders favored voting rights for 
former Confederates and the education for their children.

Indeed, if anyone should want an end to official celebrations of 
Lee and the Confederacy, it’s the white Southerners who hold on 
to this memory. The general isn’t just a totem of the 
Confederacy or an avatar for abstract qualities of honor and 
service; he’s a symbol of destructive white resistance to the 
opportunities of Reconstruction. If the white South had moved in 
a direction that opposed Lee’s values—if it had embraced the 
great potential that came with the end of slavery—we would have 
a different, and likely better, America than the one we live in.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/01
/robert_e_lee_day_some_southern_states_still_celebrate_the_confe
derate_general.html
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