{"id":54826,"date":"2017-08-17T03:47:21","date_gmt":"2017-08-17T03:47:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/?p=54826"},"modified":"2017-08-17T03:47:21","modified_gmt":"2017-08-17T03:47:21","slug":"im-black-robert-e-lee-is-my-ancestor-his-statues-cant-come-down-soon-enough","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=54826","title":{"rendered":"I\u2019m black. Robert E. Lee is my ancestor. His statues can\u2019t come down soon enough."},"content":{"rendered":"

I\u2019m black. Robert E. Lee is my ancestor. His statues can\u2019t come down soon enough.<\/strong><\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

The Washington Post<\/a>
\n2017-08-15<\/p>\n

Karen Finney<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

Defenders of Confederate<\/a> monuments are again trying to rewrite an ugly chapter in our nation\u2019s history. If my family can move on, so can they.<\/em><\/p>\n

As the biracial daughter of Jim Finney, a black civil rights lawyer descended from enslaved Virginians, and Mildred Lee, a white social worker and the great-great-great niece of Confederate General Robert E. Lee<\/a> \u2014 of whom statues stand in many cities and towns, including, now infamously, Charlottesville<\/a> \u2014 my American story is complicated.<\/p>\n

About a year ago, I made a discovery that reminded me of just how complicated both my family\u2019s and our nation\u2019s painful journey on race and equality has been.\u00a0I found two letters that my maternal grandmother, also named Mildred Lee, had written to my father.\u00a0In the first, four-page, single-spaced typed letter, she laid out arguments why my dad should leave my mom and not marry her as they\u2019d planned. Not only was marrying illegal in their respective home states of Virginia<\/a> and North Carolina<\/a>, in 1967, their forthcoming interracial marriage, she explained, was against the \u201cnatural order of things,\u201d in which black and white have their place.\u201d<\/p>\n

Quoting the Bible, she argued that their marriage would bring permanent disrepute, shame and irreparable damage not only to my mother\u2019s life but also the lives of the whole family.\u00a0A month later, my parents were married in a simple ceremony in New York City<\/a>.\u00a0In a second letter, sent less than a week before I was born, my grandmother described miscegenation<\/a> as a sin and a stain that would never be made clean, quoting the Bible and invoking \u201cthe way of things.\u201d…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Defenders of Confederate monuments are again trying to rewrite an ugly chapter in our nation\u2019s history. If my family can move on, so can they.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,459,8,6940,23674,20],"tags":[27468,27467,2875,2581],"class_list":["post-54826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-articles","category-history","category-media-archive","category-slavery","category-social-justice","category-usa","tag-karen-finney","tag-robert-e-lee","tag-the-washington-post","tag-washington-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54827,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54826\/revisions\/54827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}