South Carolina State Reps Bill Chumley and Mike Burns pre-filed a bill that would establish a commission to design an African-American Confederate veterans monument. There's only one problem: historians point out there’s no evidence such combatants ever existed. Historian Walter Edgar, the longtime director of the University of South Carolina’s Institute for Southern Studies said,“In all my years of research, I can say I have seen no documentation of black South Carolina soldiers fighting for the Confederacy...In fact, when secession came, the state turned down free (blacks) who wanted to volunteer because they didn’t want armed persons of color." Edgar, who wrote a history of the state, said any black person who served in a Confederate unit in South Carolina was either a slave or an unpaid laborer working against his will.
At www.alternet.org
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