Amos Akerman, zealous & successful prosecutor of Klu Klux Klan terrorism as Attorney General under Grant. He was himself a former slaveholder and served in the Confederate Army. After the war he embraced Reconstruction and became a staunch legal advocate of ‘freedmens’ rights. 
2/ I’ve done a series of tweets highlighting white southerners, often former Comfederate officers at a time when all are rightly seeking to put black Americans at the center of the national story. I’m doing this for a particular reason tied to the debate over US military bases ..
3/ named after Confederate Generals. Even now this public conversation focuses on heritage and respecting history. But this wasn’t the only history. After the Civil War a significant minority of White southerners, often former Confederate soldiers, committed themselves to ...
4/ building a new kind of society in the South, one in which African-Americans, the recently liberated ex-slaves, had full political, social and economic rights. Akerman is one example. In another tweet I mentioned James Longstreet, one of the most important Confederate ...
5/ Generals after Lee. This was an alternative path, ultimately not taken, but it was only put down with decades of political agitation and terrorist violence. The Confederate Generals whose names are now emblazoned on US military bases in the South were elevated ...
6/ exclusively as symbols of the successful struggle to create the Jim Crow South. Indeed, a number of them weren’t even very good generals in purely military terms. Braxton Bragg was a really bad General. Notably most of these bases were created during the heyday of Jim Crow ...
7/ in the first decades of the 20th century. There is a rich history of alternative possibilities, based on values we embrace today that can and should be remembered and memorialized.
