Pate: ‘Lost Cause’ myth held S.C. back for generations

My generation and those before were taught an incomplete and misleading history that shaped our thinking and, because we really, really believed it, fueled emotions that impeded our state’s progress.

Shortly after the Civil War, the myth of “The Lost Cause” was promoted in conversation, codified in S.C. history books and used for more than 100 years to teach millions of S.C. school children. The Lost Cause narrative claimed the Civil War was mainly about states’ rights and unfair taxes and not so much about slavery. The narrative shouted down evidence found in the “Declaration of the Immediate Causes,” written by the state’s secession convention to justify and explain secession, that the war was really fought to protect the slave system that history has shown benefited only a small number of wealthy S.C. families.

We were taught to believe that the federal government, its courts, its regulations were evil and never to be trusted. We were taught false stories about the state’s black citizens and not much about what they had endured and rarely about how they had helped build our state and nation.

These beliefs resulted in Jim Crow laws, inadequate support for roads, jobs, health care and education and the defiant display of the rebel flag on the State House dome when the federal courts ordered South Carolina to desegregate its schools.

Over the years, the challenge faced by those advocating change was how to get a people who really believed things half-true to stop and just consider that what they have believed was wrong.

Something has changed. Perhaps it reflects a shift in beliefs, or perhaps it indicates that some with old hard-fixed beliefs are passing away and a new generation is coming forward. This new generation is made up of people who have grown up together, attended schools and universities together and work together. They have been taught an accurate history of the impact of slavery on a whole race and our state and that the Civil War really, really was about slavery.

Now motivated by a horrific act committed in a church in Charleston, tempered by the forgiveness shown by the victims’ families and the healing actions of a responsive governor, local officials and the Legislature, this new generation has stepped up to crowd out those still clinging to old divisive ideas by demonstrating they want to move our state forward by working together for the betterment of all.

Columbia

This story was originally published July 15, 2015 at 5:37 PM.