Mississippi's choice: Confederate past or new flag and future
Margaret McMullan, USA Today
Published 4:00 a.m. CT Sept. 17, 2017
When I was growing up, my grandfather ... often took me to the Mount Zion Cemetery, where a marker honors two boys in our family ...
"Yankees killed them at the Battle of Murfreesboro," my grandfather told me, tearing up.
"They should’ve stayed with their mama," I snapped. Even as a kid ... I knew "the war" was mostly about slavery ...
... One year, sometime in the 1990s, my grandfather introduced my father and me to ... an old white man. My father recognized .. Edgar Ray Killen immediately and told me to leave the room. He stayed, staring down at his father sitting on the living room sofa with the former Ku Klux Klan organizer who planned and directed the murders of three civil rights boys, Schwerner among them. Killen had not been convicted. I don’t know what my father said to his father later that night, but I heard their raised voices. In 2005, Killen was found guilty of three counts of manslaughter and is serving a 60-year sentence ...
http://www.clarionledger.com/story/opinion/columnists/2017/09/17/mississippis-choice-confederate-past-new-flag-and-future/669546001/
