Open Letter to the Times: Jeffeson Davis and "Confederate Monuments"

January 6, 2024

Dear Ms. Lunelle, 

If this Tampa, Florida newspaper author was going to be fair and balanced, he would have mentioned when writing about the Honorable President Jefferson Davis that the Davis’ plantations at Jefferson Bend were routinely run by the servants. And the neighbors commonly referred to them as the Freedman's Bureau because the servants were all literate. 

The servants had full run of the plantations. President Davis's brother taught them law, consequently, they had their own legal system, and their judgment was only intervened, or overruled if a ruling of death was handed down. 

And not to forget Jim Limber, the young slave boy who was being beaten in the street in Richmond that President Davis and his wife not only stopped but then brought Jim into their home where he was treated as the President's son. It makes no difference what this newspaper writes, every indication about this great man was if all those slaves in the Southern Confederacy had been left under his care "Real Social Vertical Mobility would have been forthcoming to them."

And for more than another century they endured being second-class citizens via the legacy of Lincoln's “Root Hog or Die” policy that was perpetuated by Johnson and Grant. And the black man would watch as hundreds of thousands of their race under so-called “freedom” were herded into Refugee Camps dying from every kind of disease known to man, to include exposure to inclement weather.

In describing the black man’s emancipated condition Fredrick Douglas spoke the truth.