By Ed Piper
Antoinette Anderson is a history teacher at the middle school in Port Gibson, Mississippi. I met her at the Visitors Center at Vicksburg National Military Park, and talked with her about the Civil War and teaching it in history class.
Antoinette donates her time at the center, traveling north the half hour or so from Port Gibson, which is the site of some Civil War battles right on the Mississippi River.
"All my students are African-American, and for them it was a revelation that someone who is not black would work for the rights of blacks," she told me as we chatted amiably over the counter at the Visitors Center. She was referring to her classes studying the abolitionists, as I recall. She said she hadn't yet taught the Civil War to her students, and she was considering different ways to cover the subject.
I checked out with her this matter of some Southerners' belief, even today, that Confederate states didn't secede from the Union over slavery, rather it was about states' rights. She shook her head and said no, she doesn't buy that argument. I haven't done a scientific poll of my own, and I haven't talked to many people. But in the few conversations I have had with Southern sympathizers about the causes of the Civil War, I haven't met an African-American person who maintains secession wasn't about slavery. Those few I have chatted with who maintain this view have been white.
Antoinette talked about the various states' memorials along the 16-mile route within the Vicksburg park, financed by each of the states individually and commemorating their heroes in the war in 1861-1865. She proudly told me about the African-American memorial, the most recent addition to the park, she said, and pulled out her phone to show me a picture of it.
The young woman struck me as an energetic and caring teacher, an appropriate fit for her students, who will undoubtedly lead them to awareness and insights about the long-ago war that will be valuable to them as they grow and mature.
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