Confederate History Month is not an ancient tradition. The practice of declaring April, the month of surrender at Appomattox, to be a month set aside to remember this sorry war appears to have caught on only in the 1990s. Why would such a thing take off as recently as it did?
I think that the answer lies in the way I learned a lot about the Old South. His name was MacMullen, and by the time he settled into a lawn chair in front of the Perrine Ace Hardware store nearly every day he was a very old man. It was the early 1970s, and old MacMullen had seen a lot of changes take place. He eagerly told to a young white boy who was willing to listen to what he had to say.