Category Archive 'Second Reconstruction'

10 Sep 2020

Then, They Came for Millard Fillmore!

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The Hill has the bad news for all seriously committed Whigs.

Lawmakers in Buffalo, N.Y., approved a motion to remove the name of the 13th U.S. President Millard Fillmore from properties owned by the city.

The Buffalo Common Council is seeking input from residents as to what name should replace Fillmore’s on city property, local ABC affiliate WKBW reported.

The motion was voted on after Buffalo residents voiced concerns about keeping Fillmore’s name over his role in signing into law legislation that represented the Compromise of 1850.

Those bills allowed California to enter the union as a “free” state with no slavery, but also included a fugitive slave act that required officials and citizens in states where slavery was outlawed to help in the return of escaped slaves.

The motion follows the University of Buffalo’s decision to remove Fillmore’s name from the campus in August.

Residents are urged to contact the city council for nominations of new names to replace the old.

The Community Development Committee of the Buffalo Common Council is slated to convene Tuesday to deliberate the proposal of replacing Fillmore’s name.

During our Second Reconstruction, retrospective failure to have been as radical as Thaddeus Stevens or Charles Sumner will receive condign punishment.

HT: JWB.

27 Apr 2018

Stephen Foster Statue Removed in Pittsburgh

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The statue that formerly stood outside the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh depicted the young Stephen Foster being inspired by an African American playing a banjo.

Nearly all the important American music of the 19th century was composed by Stephen Foster in the course of his brief lifetime. The music of the minstrel show comes essentially from Stephen Foster, and that music went right on into vaudeville and later Hollywood. A handful of Stephen Foster tunes remain staples even today. Try imagining the Kentucky Derby without “My Old Kentucky Home.”

No one played a greater role in integrating the music and culture of African Americans into the universal popular culture of the country. No one ever depicted the viewpoint and character of the African American with more sympathy and affection.

It was the music of Stephen Foster that made white entertainers don blackface in order to emulate with affection the humor, the rhetoric, and the distinctive character of the African American.

No one more important and influential to the culture of the United States ever came from Pittsburgh.

Who would imagine that in blue-collar, beer-drinking, steel-making Pittsburgh the Social Justice Warriors would be in power and able yesterday to pull down Stephen Foster’s statue put up in 1900 by a local committee headed –no less– by Andrew Mellon?

What a despicable time we live in, in which being some species of nincompoop seems to be an essential ingredient for promotion to a position of public responsibility and authority!

Some News Agency has the story.

The Second Reconstruction marches on, right over America.


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