Monday letters: There’s no honor in defending Confederacy

My family lived in South Carolina before independence. My great-grandfather and his kin wore gray. The Confederate flag offends me. So do Confederate Memorial Day and all Confederate monuments. Not because they’re “bad for business.” Because they’re wrong.

Wealthy slave owners unleashed the Civil War to defend and extend the most criminal institution ever. They sent hundreds of thousands of poor people to fight. Those who died, South and North, were murdered by slavery as surely as the millions of black people who died in bondage. Yes, those who died in bondage were murdered. Human beings were tortured and worked to death to create the vast fortunes of the cotton industry.

The overthrow of slavery and Reconstruction were the best things to happen in this state.

Elected black war heroes such as Robert Smalls created the first public schools, for black and white alike. We need state monuments to real freedom fighters like Smalls, the 1st South Carolina Volunteers, Denmark Vesey and Starling Carlton, a white South Carolinian executed in 1859 for helping an escaped slave.

There is no honor in fighting for an unjust cause, no glory in being used. The only honor is in standing for justice.

Columbia