A little bit more about the burning of the headquarters of the United Daughters of the Confederacy last night in Richmond, Virginia. Some of you may be surprised to learn that the UDC's chief archivist is an African-American woman by the name of Teresa Roane.

I can't confirm that Roane has any formal training in archival work, but her presence in the UDC reinforces one of their key Lost Cause tenets: African Americans remained loyal to their masters and to the Confederacy until the end of the war and that slavery was benign.

One of the best examples of the UDC's commitment to this belief is the dedication of the Confederate monument in Arlington National Cemetery in 1914. The monument includes two powerful examples of the loyal slave myth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confederate_Memorial_(Arlington_National_Cemetery)

The first is the image of the "loyal mammy" and the second is the image of the faithful body servant (camp slave) marching off to war with his master. Both images reinforce the claim that the Confederacy was not fighting to preserve the institution of slavery. However...

...it does more than that. These images reinforced the white racial hierarchy at the turn of the twentieth century and sent a powerful message to the black community that they were expected to defer to white authority at a time of intense racial unrest.

And that is exactly what the UDC hoped their monuments and the rest of their projects would achieve. It wasn't simply about commemorating their fallen heroes on the battlefields of the 1860s. It was about ensuring that African Americans never again threaten white control.

Teresa Roane is a living reminder for the ladies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy that their mythical view of the Civil War and Reconstruction still has legitimacy. I suspect that not a few members are thinking twice about that after last night.

I discuss all of this in much more detail in my new book, SEARCHING FOR BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR'S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH. http://cwmemory.com/searching-for-black-confederates-the-civil-wars-most-persistent-myth/