Dear editor:
Charles Wagner Smith, your guest column was absolutely right -- take down that flag! I well remember the first time I saw the so-called Confederate flag on a highway to Kansas City from the small town where we lived. With a heavy heart, I recognized immediately that it represented a backlash to the Civil Rights movement that had revealed the hard truths of our segregated past.
I am the granddaughter of a Johnny Reb. My family roots go from Oklahoma back through Arkansas to Alabama and South Carolina. I'm neither proud nor ashamed of my family history -- it is what it is. It was not the War Between the States. It was not the War of Northern Aggression. It was the Civil War and it was about slavery. The South lost. Let's get over it!
And let's get on with treating each other with the dignity and respect every human being deserves. I wrote a book about my grandfather's family and shared this quote with my fellow descendants:
"Whereof what's past is prologue, what to come in yours and my discharge." -- Shakespeare
Wanda Sanders Bodemann
Hot Springs
Editorial on 07/01/2015