Edgerton, Asheville’s Confederate flag activist, urges city to honor Confederate Heritage and History Month

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H.K. Edgerton, Asheville’s well-known African-American proponent of the Confederate flag, was back on a city street Friday, this time waving his banner and urging Asheville City Council to adopt a proclamation honoring April as Confederate Heritage and History Month.

Edgerton waved to passersby – even saluting a few – on Patton Avenue near the intersection of Haywood Road Friday morning. He said he’s been traveling to cities and towns in South Carolina and Tennessee, where he’s asked for a similar proclamation and received them. He said he was frustrated that his hometown hadn’t followed suit. Many view the flag as a symbol of Southern pride and adorn their homes with it, some going as far to have a confederate flag on a blanket.

“What the hell, y’all. C’mon,” said Edgerton. “It’s the decent thing to do. At least acknowledge these honorable folks who fought for the South. We’ve just shut out one whole section of history.”

The Huffington Post recently noted the Confederate Heritage and History Month celebration in Georgia, with this caveat:

While six states observe Confederate Heritage and History Month, it’s notable that four states of the former Confederacy do not: South Carolina, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. But the fact that this state-sanctioned month of honoring the Confederacy exists in so many states so long after the Civil War is worthy of debate.

It was back in 2002 that the former head of the Ashvegas chapter of the NAACP donned a Civil War uniform, picked up a Confederate battle flag and walked from Asheville to Texas. He did it to bring attention to a symbol he says has been hijacked. He argues that many blacks and whites got along well before and after the Civil War. He continued his argument along the side of the road Friday morning.

“No African saw this flag on a slave ship,” he said, waving his flag. “They saw the Stars and Stripes,” adding that his symbol has its roots in the Christian cross of St. Andrew.

“Discarded history and lies created all this hate” around the Confederate flag, he said.

Edgerton has made a living for years off the the controversial contradiction he embodies: a black man traveling the country espousing the greatness of the Confederacy and the Confederate flag, and many people vehemently disagree with him. More Edgerton background here and here.

39 Comments

Sam April 10, 2014 - 10:54 pm

All cities, counties and states in the South should observe this important month of study, reflection and deep respect for the men who honorably defended their country from a foreign invasion. Reading “The South Was Right” by the Kennedy brothers should be on every school’s required reading list. God Bless The South! And thank you, Mr. Edgerton, for your good works!

The Slavery War April 10, 2014 - 9:52 pm

Seeing a black man with the Confederate flag is like seeing a Jew with the Nazi flag. There were blacks in the Confederate Army. There were also over 100,000 Jews in the Nazi army. It doesn’t mean the Holocaust didn’t happen or that the Nazi weren’t racist any more than the Confederates weren’t fighting for slavery or racism. Hitler wasn’t going to help the Jewish soldier any more than the slave owner was going to help the black man. The black man was farm equipment to the slave owner and nothing more. Don’t fool yourself HK Edgerton. Also, the Sons of Confederate Veterans don’t need to justify their ancestors any more than the Germans need to justify their Nazi ancestors. You are your own person. Move on and be a proud American!

Sam April 10, 2014 - 10:57 pm

Ignorant and hateful comments such as this one are exactly the reason there should be a Confederate History Month.

Fark April 8, 2014 - 10:22 am

North Carolina was the unwilling Hercules of the Civil War, not wanting to be drawn into it. The Mountains of NC and TN were very pro-union, and strongholds for deserters. Nonetheless it is our history and should be acknowledged for what it is.

Big Al April 9, 2014 - 5:58 am

The EASTERN third of NC was also pro-union. Two white regiments of infantry were raised in addition to the eight or more regiments of NC freedmen in Bertie and surrounding counties.

Fark April 9, 2014 - 8:23 am

Thanks for sharing that!

rightsouthron April 8, 2014 - 9:31 am

I submit Confederate History and Heritage month is very appropriate. The history of no other American solder has been so maligned as the Confederate. No other American flag has been so wrongfully maligned as the Confederate flag. No other First Amendment right has been so attacked as has the ability to honor the Confederate veteran in word and deed. Thanks, HK, for your steadfast work in Asheville and everywhere you travel.

theOtherBarry April 6, 2014 - 9:49 am

Edgerton has made a living for years off the controversial contradiction he embodies

And if you go to his webpage and follow where his donations go:

Southern Heritage 411 Inc.
P.O. Box 220
Odum GA 31555

You’ll see that these are the people he is in league with:

tinyurl.com/l62l4mg

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 4:53 pm

Don’t just go to my website. Make a donation to a man who has given his own fortune to the cause of American injustice #1. The Poverty Pimps receive more money in an hour than I receive in two years. The continuous effort by some of my detractors to shame me about donations when the politicians of this country spend 90% of their time fund raising in Washington, and 10% to the peoples business is pure poppycock. And I use this forum to thank those who believe in my efforts enough to send me one dime. God bless them, and I shall do everything in my power to make them proud.

RJ April 6, 2014 - 9:26 am

This has to be one very lonely man.

Scot April 8, 2014 - 9:55 am

Quite the contrary! H.K. has many friends all across the South!

Timothy April 8, 2014 - 10:25 am

Yep, probably all those white folks who you hear say “some of my best friends are black.”

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 4:55 pm

I wonder just what you say Timothy. You probably don’t have one Black friend.

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 4:25 pm

Thanks Scott for telling the truth. God bless you. Your brother, HK

Big Al April 6, 2014 - 6:30 am

“At least acknowledge these honorable folks who fought for the South.”

We already do. Veterans Day and memorial Day both celebrate the sacrifices and contributions of ALL AMERICAN veterans, including those who fought for the southern Confederacy. The Veterans’ Administration even provides free tombstones to mark the graves of CSA soldiers.

But to add “Confederate”-specific celebrations is to go beyond commemorating individual courage and sacrifice and into the realm of celebrating the POLITICAL goals and beliefs of the Confederate States of America.

Among those beliefs was that of the solvency of the union of states created by the 1776 Declaration of Independence and codified in the US Constitution. Founding Father George Washington, whose likeness the CSA placed on its’ Great Seal, spoke of the Union as indivisible.

Slavery, which so many modern neo-Confederates deny was a cause if the war, was quoted to be a cornerstone of the foundation of the Confederacy by no less than its’ own Vice-president.

The lies and manipulations of the Confederate legacy by Edgerton and his allies, most notably Kirk Lyons of the Black Mountain-based Southern Legal Resource Center, has poisoned and destroyed once-honorable groups like the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The motto of the North Carolina Division of the SCV was once “Honoring Our Veterans: Nothing More, Never Less”, until Lyons and his allies (including Edgerton) led a purge of some 300 of their 3,000 members (10 percent!) who resisted Lyons’ efforts to turn the SCV into a hard-right southern-white-christian civil rights fund-raising and propaganda machine, leading to a mass exodus of disenchanted members and leaving the SCV a pitiful shadow of its’ former self.

As a proud descendant of Confederate soldiers, I hope the City of Asheville ignores Mr. Edgerton’s pathetic antics and leaves the commemoration of our soldiers, including the Confederates, to the ways and means already established.

Ashley April 6, 2014 - 8:39 am

Very well stated, Big Al.

Sam April 6, 2014 - 2:52 pm

The so-called “cornerstone speech” by Alexander Stephens does not ‘prove’ anything in the direction of having slavery being an important part of the CSA. The one source of that “speech” comes from a newspaper article that was written by one reporter who took very bad notes and took generous poetic license, which makes it “not a credible source”. In the 1860s there were no recording devices, only pencil and paper. Speeches typically took an hour or more, and anyone who could remember the full speech other than the speaker were very small in number. In Stephens’ memoirs, published after the War and is now reprinted, he states that the reporter had terribly misquoted him and Stephens issued many corrections to many newspapers. Stephens was talking about how the United States had always been a proponent and defender of slavery, and used one example of an 1830s Pennsylvania case resided over by US Supreme Court Justice Henry Baldwin. Baldwin said in Johnson vs. Tompkins, 1 Bald., 597: “Slavery is the corner-stone of the Constitution; the foundations of the government are laid and rest on the right of property in slaves, and the whole structure must fall by disturbing the corner-stone.”
Stephens was using that quote to show that it was not the South that started slavery and the North had defended the practice in court. Stephens went on to say that his own views were that slavery should be abolished.
Anyone who has studied history thoroughly will be supporting Mr. H.K. Edgerton and the great history of the CSA. Read “The South Was Right” by the Kennedy brothers, and the works of Mildred Lewis Rutherford. God Bless The South!

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 4:26 pm

Amen!

Sam April 6, 2014 - 3:01 pm

If the war was “all about slavery”, then in April 1861, why were there more slave-holding states in the North (8) than in the CSA (7) ? And why didn’t the North free all their slaves before invading the South on the pretext of freeing their slaves? And how do you explain that the written war records show that over 320,000 Union soldiers were slaveowners, while far less of that number in the CSA owned any slaves? There were several active slave markets in Washington through the War, one was in the back of a hotel within earshot of the white House. Slaves worked on the renovation of the White House every day Lincoln was there, but he never freed any of them.
That war was about the right to self-governance, against high taxes, economic freedom, and keeping the original Constitution.
Lord Russell, British foreign minister during the War Between the States, wrote: “It is dreadful to think that hundreds of thousands of men are being slaughtered for the purpose of preventing the Southern States from acting on those very principles of independence which, in 1776, were asserted by the whole of America against this country.”

The cause of the so-called “Civil War” in one sentence:
“Whether the Federal Government should be an agent (and subservient) to the States and the People or whether the States and the People shall be subservient to the Federal Government.”

The Slavery War April 7, 2014 - 12:47 pm

Slavery caused political and economic divides leading up to the war. The nation was divided politically between free and slave states. As more free states were being created, the South was losing political power. The political divide also had an economic reason. The North especially Lincoln wanted high tariffs to protect it manufacturing. The South had little manufacturing to protect. They feared high tariffs would provoke England and Europe to impose retaliatory tariffs on USA which would hurt the South’s cotton export. Again, it was slavery which made cotton viable.

Where there was less slavery like the southern Appalachians particularly East Tennessee and West Virginia, there was a lot of Unionists. Tennessee’s 1st congressional district in the east, where President Lincoln’s Vice President Andrew Johnson comes from, has voted republican for over 120 years and before then Democrat Unionists. Radford Gatlin was forced out of Gatlinburg because of his pro-confederacy views.

HK Edgerton April 7, 2014 - 9:23 am

Big Al, You need to wake up and attend a Sons of Confederate Veterans Camp meeting. You speak like a couch potato who claims to be a proud descendant of Confederate soldiers, but I don’t believe a word of it. You are the very reason that our Southern babies are attacked in their schools and social places just like their parents are if they even don the Southern Cross. Not to even mention the lies and distortions of history they are force fed, or even the attacks on the character of great men like Lee, Jackson, and Davis. Big Al, you talk like Rip Van Winkle, you need to wake up. And I shall continue my pathetic antics as Ghandi, King, and Anthony did to over come an injustice to my homeland and its people. By the way, see if you can find the Confederate soldier that was removed from its base at the County Courthouse after a young Black girl called for the tree limbs to be cut that hid it from view. Then you ask young Candice Hardwick, Tommy Defoe, the babies at Maryville High School, the babies at Hayes High School, the babies at Nathan Bedford Forrest High School, the Southern babies of the Boy Scouts, the Sons of Confederate Veterans who are banned from marching with their Colors by American Legion Post #2 in Knoxville in the Veterans Day Parade, Sgt. Thrasher, a Korean Veteran who lay in his hospital bed at the VA Hospital in Memphis and had his blotter flag of the Southern Cross snatched away; the same Flag that the United States troops carried during the Korean conflict; about your established ways of commemoration to the Confederate soldiers. And when you get through asking about that, then you ask them about HK Edgerton.

theOtherBarry April 7, 2014 - 11:27 am

HK, can you explain to us how you justify to yourself being affiliated with these folks in Georgia who distribute pure race hatred in the form of Obama-as-a-monkey-swinging-from-a-tree t-shirts, etc.?

Yes, I know, they also distribute a very nice t-shirt showing you off as a great hero, but you can’t ignore the others.

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 4:32 pm

The same way that you associate with the New Black Panther Party with Clubs in their hands at the voting booth. You can’t ignore the others.

adam arthur April 7, 2014 - 3:24 pm

From the declaration to secede by the Great State of South Carolina….

“…But an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery, has led to a disregard of their obligations, and the laws of the General Government have ceased to effect the objects of the Constitution.”

While there may have been a myriad of reasons, the fact is the Civil War was also fought over slavery. Only apologists say otherwise.

Sam April 7, 2014 - 11:42 pm

Adam needs to go back and read what i ALREADY WROTE that nullifies his view about “it was all about slavery”. Only a Northern apologist would still think it was all about slavery when all facts and logic show that it wasn’t. Read “The South Was Right” by the Kennedy brothers. And study about the Corwin Amendment. Good heavens, Adam, WAKE UP !!!!!

adam arthur April 8, 2014 - 1:40 pm

Wide awake and Kool-Ade free, sir. I am not an apologist, I am a realist. You (and your ilk) are desperate to rewrite history, fine. Just file it under the ‘fiction’ section and be done with it.

adam arthur April 8, 2014 - 1:44 pm

Also, how many slave-owners were there after the war? None. Slavery was a major part of it. I have lived in the South my whole life. I have seen first hand the bigotry and intolerance of the southern racist. We owned people and we desired to keep on owning people. That’s it. If the South was so honorable, explain Jim Crow, Lynchings, the use of the police to stop protesters, separate-but-equal, and laws banning interracial marriage. You are a fool, sir. But, whatever.

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 4:43 pm

Absolutely the issue of slavery was on the table, but not in the manner in which my Yankee friends tell it. They too were as complicit in the economic institution of slavery as most of the civilized world, to include the Africans who sold their people into it. And with the surrender of the Honorable General Robert E. Lee to Grant who owned slaves when he went into the White House in 1869; we are now all slaves with a federal government that could care less about the constitution, and a Supreme Court that needs not to be in power for life.

Loni April 8, 2014 - 10:44 am

The whole war between the states was over $$$$$$$. GOOGLE Morrill Tariff act as well as the Corwin Amendment which would have made slavery permanent. The lies have been told for 150 years about the South and the reasons for that war. The EP was bunk! Didn’t liberate ANYONE! Particularly the ‘slaves’ in the north. Thank God Mr. Edgerton knows the truth and spends his days walking in it just as we are told to do in 3rd John 3-4. Original documents are online now and there is absolutely no excuse for anyone to be willingly ignorant. Thank you Mr. Edgerton! God bless!
P.S. Confederate Veterans were recognized to be ‘American Veterans’ in 1958 by an act of Congress. What American veterans will be next???????

Sam April 8, 2014 - 9:52 pm

Amen, Loni. People like adam are so brainwashed they are unable to recognize facts. Thanks for speaking the truth Loni.

The Slavery War April 8, 2014 - 10:25 pm

It was about $$$. Slavery made them a lot of money. In truth, the North wanted to keep the Union together more than it wanted to abolish slavery. Yet, the South did not trust people like Lincoln. The Corwin Amendment, similar to one Jefferson Davis had previously proposed, was not enough to entice them back.

Many poor southern white were manipulated by the propaganda rich planters. No descendent wants to believe their ancestors died so slave owners could stay rich, so they choose to propagate the old propaganda. In reality, if slavery had continued, they stood the most to lose. Cheap slave labor undercut their wages. Unionist President Andrew Johnson of Tennessee said, “You tell me, friends, of the liberation of the colored people of the South. But have you thought of the millions of Southern white people who have been liberated by the war?” The Union victory eventually helped poor whites earn a decent in living doing what whites up north did-working in factories and mines.

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 5:05 pm

And don’t forget that most of the Southern Plantations were run by an agent of the Northern Banks called a Factor. And it is true that most Southern Whites could find no work on these Plantations because that work was being performed by trained cadre of the African people. And after the War for Southern Independence, the carpetbaggers and the Yankee military rulers use the vagrancy laws to force these same Africans to work for far less wages than their white counterparts. White folks continued to suffer under the rule of so called reconstruction.

Big Al April 9, 2014 - 5:54 am

Mr. Edgerton, thanks to you and your neo-confederate cronies like Kirk Lyons, I am not allowed to attend a camp meeting of the SCV, as I was one of the 300 whose membership was suspended (on the week AFTER my annual dues were collected) for “conduct unbecoming an officer”. My “conduct unbecoming” was excercising my First Amendment right to sign an on-line petition opposing the suspension of the NC Division Commander, a moderate Son who had just defeated the radical Kirk Lyons in the election for Commander, Army of Northern Virginia (which includes the state Divisions of VA, NC, SC, GA and FL). I could only be reinstated if I surrendered to a kangeroo court of said cronies and begged their forgiveness for my sedition.

Such an “honorable” organization is the SCV. It has NOTHING to teach me about honor and DOES NOT represent the honor of Confederate Veterans.

HK Edgerton April 9, 2014 - 11:40 am

You in your bitterness need to stop accusing me of something that I had no hand in. Some of my favorite people got caught up in the fracas you talk about. God bless them and you. I wish all of you could work out your problems. The Sons of Confederate Veterans is packed with Honorable men. And just like any organization, there will always be exceptions to that rule. Past Commander Rick and his wife are still one of favorite persons, and I shall never forget the day that my little brother and I spent with them when the Hunley was brought from its grave. Don’t take your hate out on me. Some of those 300 men you speak of were responsible for some of the many awards that I received from the SCV that would take at least a week for me to recount. We all have a lot of pain that needs healing, and especially among our own. I have always loved walking into a room, and hugging every man there, and not having to worry or deal with the politics that become personal. And I truly hope that you and the others will come back to the Sons as your ancestors would want you to, and change things for the better of all. God bless you. Your brother, HK

theOtherBarry April 9, 2014 - 12:11 pm

HK

Please explain to us how you can partner with that company in Georgia that distributes hateful racist garbage like Obama-as-monkey or Obama-as-witchdoctor. I’ve put this question to you for years, and you’ve never responded.

In my opinion, that relationship discredits everything else you do.

HK Edgerton April 10, 2014 - 5:16 pm

To the other Barry. First of all, you are a liar. This is the first time that I have ever heard this comment, or question from you, or even heard of you. I am a Republican, and have seen as much of this political satire placed on members of this Party. And you speak as though these characterizations of the President come only from Georgia. Some more of your Northern lies.

theOtherBarry April 10, 2014 - 6:02 pm

Click on the link, Mr. Edgerton, and tell us this company doesn’t share the same address that you urge people to send your donations to:

http://barberandcompany.com/barber_store/view_details?department_id=20&item_id=13652

“Barber and Company
204 Thomas Street
P O Box 220
Odum GA 31555”

“Southern Heritage 411 Inc.
P.O. Box 220
Odum GA 31555”

theOtherBarry April 11, 2014 - 12:52 pm

And this is not “political satire”, sir. This is describing a black man as a chimpanzee. I have no idea why you are not offended by this, but I am.

Please stop being a ‘beard’ for these guys, HK.

smac April 4, 2014 - 10:47 pm

jees oh man

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