Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

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

The South is the only part of the country that has been defeated; the rest of the country, unlike most people in the world have never been conquered. But the Southerners have …. The South is the soul of America.

It takes some serious mental gymnastics to think of the Confederacy only as a romantic lost cause.

Any Southern nationalist movement, especially one that wraps itself in the Confederate flag, is going to be viewed with suspicion, given the historical record.

I can see why many Southerners, black ones in particular, don't like the implication that Southernness and the Confederate heritage are one and the same, because they're not. On the other hand, there are people who want to extirpate that completely and want folks to spit on the graves of their ancestors.

The South was right. Say it! Say it!

Let the undivided voice of the South go forth ... declaring our determination to resist even to civil war

Being a son of the South puts you in a different position when it comes to the Confederate flag. It means something entirely different to the people who have ancestors who fought in the Civil War on the south side of the Mason-Dixon line.

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

Anything to do with the South resonates with me, because I'm Southern.

Andrew Johnson was a Southerner generally who proclaimed that his native state of Tennessee was a country for white men.

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

I feel like if you're a girl in the South, you know 'Gone with the Wind' better than anything. Scarlett O'Hara is such a quintessential Southern woman.

If it is a crime to love the South, its cause and its President, then I am a criminal. I would rather lie down in this prison and die than leave it owing allegiance to a government such as yours.

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.

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.

As a kid, I was growing up in an era of celebration of the Civil War centennial, with a lot of 'Lost Cause' emphasis on the Confederacy. I used to play Civil War soldiers with my brothers as a child, and my older brother always insisted that he got to be Lee, and I got be Grant. I never knew that Grant won until quite some time had passed.

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.

Perhaps most perniciously, neo-Confederates now claim that the South seceded over states' rights. Yet when each state left the Union, its leaders made clear that they were seceding because they were for slavery and against states' rights.

The Army runs Fort A.P. Hill, named for a Confederate general whose men killed African American soldiers after they surrendered.

Every Southern man sustains me. The fragments of the stick are begged for as sacred relicts. .

Make common cause with the South and refuse to allow passage of Union troops through the city.

I have often thought Dixie to be one of the finest songs which the Confederates have appropriated. I put the question to the Attorney General, and he determined that it is our property.

The long-continued and intemperate interference of the Northern people with the question of slavery in the Southern States has at length produced its natural effects.