Sally Mann Quotes

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

I grew up in the South, so a huge part of our American History education revolved around the Civil War.

The South was my country but the South went to war on account of slavery.

The South was right. Say it! Say it!

The thing about the South is we accept our history. We don't push it under the rug.

The Deep South has a completely different history, both good and bad, that is fascinating for everybody. It makes people work together who usually don't, and that sounds like a cliche in so many ways, but it actually happened... and it happened because of a beautiful idea.

Prior to the Civil War, most libraries were either privately owned or housed in universities or churches.

I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.

I read a funny story about how the Republicans freed the slaves. The Republicans are the ones who created slavery by law in the 1600's. Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves and he was not a Republican.

I was born just barely south of the Mason Dixon line.

America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.

My name is Natasha Trethewey, and I was born in Gulfport, Mississippi, in 1966, exactly 100 years to the day that Mississippi celebrated the first Confederate Memorial Day, April 26, 1866.

The people of the Southern States now own near five millions of these negroes, and they are worth to them near three millions of dollars.

Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

If Abraham Lincoln had had his way, there would be no Black people in America—None!

We cannot forget that America was built on Africa.

In the mid 19th century, it had taken a generation of political rhetoric to induce southern soldiers to fight for the interests of a small ruling class in the name of democracy.

My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s and, therefore, was born into slavery but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.

I live in the South; there are Confederate flags everywhere.

Slave narratives had their greatest influence on public opinion and on literature in the U.S. between 1830 and 1860. After Reconstruction's defeat, their urgency of tone was replaced by the softer one of reminiscence.

African-American history is American history.

We know what the Dixie flag represents and its heritage; the Civil War was fought over States rights.

I do believe states' rights was a sound doctrine that got hijacked by some unsavory customers for a while - like, 150 years or so. I'm professionally obliged to believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, but some kinds of forgetting are OK with me.

I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Confederacy.