View complete coverage of the 150th anniversary of the Civil WarMONTGOMERY, Ala. -- One city block and 150 years from the first White House of the Confederacy, descendants of Confederate soldiers gathered outside the Alabama Capitol on Monday to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day.
In Montgomery, the first official capital of the Confederacy, nearly 100 convened for the commemoration. Several men wore Confederate soldier uniforms. A few women wore "widow's weeds" -- the black dress a dead soldier's wife would wear for the first year after her husband's death.
"You can't rewrite history," said Leslie Kirk, chairwoman of the Alabama Division of the United Daughters of the Confederacy. "You can honor it, and you can learn from it."
Read more
American Civil War commemorated way, way down south of Dixie
Kirk organized this year's commemoration at the Capitol, where pastor Cecil Williamson was keynote speaker.
"We should never be ashamed of our Southern heritage, but we should be ashamed of those who are," Williamson said.
In the decades since the Civil War, he said, "the why and for what Confederate soldiers fell has undergone a dramatic change in this country at the feet of the new unholy trinity of political correctness, multiculturalism and diversity."
Many in the audience said they came to honor their ancestors rather than to send a political message. Others said the war was about much more than slavery.
Near the ceremony's end, dozens took turns reading the names of long-gone relatives who fought in battles across the South. One ancestor was the drummer for Gen. Robert E. Lee.
Several Southern states -- including Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia -- recognize the day as an official state holiday, when state offices are closed.
A few miles away, Alabama State University, a historically black university in Montgomery, held its first Confederate Memorial Day conference to critique the Confederacy.
Professors and students met for a series of panels that discussed President Abraham Lincoln's view of slavery, the Confederacy's government and how the Civil War informed the civil rights movement in the same city a century later.
Derryn Moten, a history and political science professor who organized the Alabama State conference, said he doesn't care if Confederate Memorial Day is a holiday but is concerned with myths surrounding how and why the war began. He said it's clear the "cardinal issue" of the war was slavery.
"In fact I think that African-Americans understand that the attitudes that accepted, that perpetuated, that purported slavery were the same attitudes that accepted, that perpetuated, that purported, and that tried to justify segregation," he said.
Moten said he especially likes Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1965 voting rights speech from the steps of the Alabama Capitol. In it, King recited several stanzas from the "Battle Hymn of the Republic."
"It was a song that Union soldiers often sang when they captured Confederate cities," Moten said. "And by invoking that song, Dr. King was saying to George Wallace and all like him, that 'You're going to lose this war just like you lost that last war,' and he knew he was standing in the cradle of the Confederacy when he gave that speech."