“Don’t try to force me as a black man who knows his history to honor something that goes against my heritage” reads the caption under a photo of a black man in today’s The New York Times.
The article that followed was a media-based initiative by NYT to to supersede the will of the vast majority of the people of Mississippi who voted on Tuesday to keep their state flag depicting the Confederate battle flag's saltire that draped the casket of Confederate Lieutenant General Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson.
What the New York Times has given us today is a "classic" example of historical revision, when compared with the journal's previous documentation:
The New York Times, July 30, 1906:
Erected in Negro Church by Contributions from Negroes.
ROANOKE, Va., July 29 -- A memorial window of Gen. "Stonewall" Jackson was unveiled in the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church today. The congregation is composed of negroes. The window was erected by the pastor, the Rev. L. L. Downing, the money for its purchase coming wholly from negroes.
The Exercises were largely attended by both races, the Confederate camps of Roanoke and Salem and the chapters of the Daughters of the Confederacy. There were addresses by white citizens of Roanoke.
Downing's father and mother were members of a Sunday school class of negro slaves taught by Jackson at Lexington before the war, and to-day's exercises marked the realization of an ambition Downing has had since boyhood, to pay fitting tribute to the Confederate commander.
The picture presented on the window is that of an army camping on the banks of a stream, the inscription underneath being Jackson's last words: "Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees."
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