The leaders of the Confederacy were always crystal clear that they tried to leave the United States in order to maintain and expand the enslavement of Black people. They said so in plain language over and over and over and over again.

It's always astonished me that people treat them as heroes of a mythical lost cause.

Any society that truly abhorred racism and sincerely regretted enslavement would hold up these men as monsters, not as cultural heroes.

The fact that people keep trying to rehabilitate them and treat them as heroes shows us exactly how far we have to go to defeat racism.