The photo has circulated for years, shared on Twitter and political sites when the problems of racism and discrimination dominate the news: the majority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, much younger than he is now, smiling alongside a white man in front of a Confederate war flag. .
The Kentucky Democratic Party, for example, uses the symbol periodically and has reintroduced it into two blog posts criticizing the Republican of Louisville this summer.
The photo caught the eye last year after the publication of a racist photo of Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam’s medical school yearbook and Northam admitted that he was once dressed in wax in his face for a Michael Jackson costume.
And this recently struck on social media when others protested racism and police brutality.
“I think he owes the public an explanation,” Democratic Democrat Party spokeswoman Marisa McNee said of the photo. “If you didn’t have to stand in front of a Confederate flag today, you’d have to be able to say, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.'”
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The story of McConnell’s picture, now 78, is a little dark.
The photo is believed to have originated at the beginning of a Big Spring Country Club occasion organized through John Hunt Morgan Camp 1342 of the Louisville-based Sons of Confederate Veterans, an organization of men descendants of Confederate soldiers.
NCO Bill Hayes of Camp John Hunt Morgan 1342 told the Courier Journal that his camp had very few members who were there in the early 1990s. He once interviewed an older member in the photo, who told him that it had been taken on one of his occasions when McConnell had been invited to speak.
McConnell himself, in an interview with The Courier Journal, said he believed the photo was taken in his first term in the Senate, which lasted from 1984 to 1990, at an assembly of Sons of Confederate Veterans in Louisville.
“I don’t much, ” he said over the photo. “But the explanation for why I was invited to come and communicate with them is that I am in fact the ancestor of a Confederate soldier, and I had been looking for data about him. And that’s what I communicated about.”
In retrospect, he said: “I don’t regret talking to an organization that at the time wasn’t considered, you know, an out parity in our society. Over the years, I’ve probably formed too many teams and shook hands with many other people who didn’t agree with me.”
Confederate iconography, adding the flag of war, has long been debatable due to the well-documented history of racism and slavery in the Confederacy.
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McConnell, who grew up in the South when segregation was still legal and described how his parents instilled confidence in civil rights, noted that the fact that he gave the impression at Sons of Confederate Veterans’s “not as important” as the movements he took at the time as a public official.
For example, he referred to his term as Jefferson County executive ruling in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he said he had accepted a consent order in a racial discrimination case within the police department. According to the executive order, he said the county government had instituted affirmative action policies to hire black people.
“As you can imagine, it didn’t happen very well to the Fraternal Police Order,” he said, and the union opposed him in his re-election crusade and “almost handed me over.”
Then, in his first two years as a senator in the mid-1980s, he supported the law to impose economic sanctions on the racist apartheid regime of the South African government, though Republican President Ronald Reagan objected.
Referring to the photo, he said, “I was there to communicate about my ancestor, which I did. And everything I do Array … I think I emphasized that I’m a strong opponent of racial discrimination. I showed it in the county. Almost (I lost) re-election because of this because the FOP hated what I did, and I overtoid President Reagan’s veto on the anti-apartheid law.”
Debates about Confederate symbols have arisen over and over again over the decades.
In 1993, the then Sen. Carol Moseley Braun, the first black woman elected to the Senate, suggested to her colleagues refusing to renew a long-standing patent through the United Daughters of Confederation for an emblem representing the Confederate flag.
“The question is whether Americans like me that in the promise of this country Array … we will have to suffer the indignity of being continually reminded that at some point in the history of this country, we were human goods,” he said at the time.
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McConnell supported the renewal of the patent, raising his “veneration for my ancestors,” a majority of the Senate voted with Braun.
McConnell’s great-great-grandparents, James McConnell and Richard Daley, owned slaves.
He didn’t question it, he didn’t mention it in his memoir, “The Long Game.”
He wrote that his great-grandfather had enlisted as a Confederate soldier in 1863 at the age of 17.
In this book, he also spoke about his years of training in the South in the early 1950s and how he and many other children at the time “had great-grandparents fighting Robert E. Lee, whose grandmothers belonged to the United Daughters of Confederation.” . “
In a recent News of Twitter post, David Schankula, a Kentucky-born documentary filmmaker, related the Moseley-Braun debate to McConnell’s opposing position with his appearance at a Sons of Confederate Veterans assembly where the picture of him would possibly have been taken.
Schankula includes a 1994 excerpt from Confederate Veteran magazine that McConnell spoke on behalf of the United Daughters of Confederation and says the senator revered through the John Hunt Morgan Camp at his meeting on October 23.
In recent years, public pressure on McConnell and other government officials has intensified to denounce and remove Confederate flags, monuments and names from places of honor. And since at least 2015, McConnell has expressed its elimination in some cases.
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After a white supremacist killed nine black worshippers taking part in a Bible exam in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 2015, he agreed with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley that the Confederate war flag was no longer displayed in that state (or any other state). Capitol.
“The Confederate fighting flag means other things to other people, however, the fact that it remains a painful reminder of racial oppression for many at least suggests to me that it is time to go beyond that, and that the time for a scouse state to borrow long ago happened,” he said at the time.
That same summer, McConnell said he agreed to the removal of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s statue of the roundabout at the Kentucky Capitol, which is also a statue of former President Abraham Lincoln.
“I don’t think we’re going to do the airbrush story. The civil war happened,” McConnell said in an interview with WDRB News. “I think it’s okay that Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln are not equivalent in stature, which doesn’t mean Jefferson Davis wasn’t a vital user in American history. It was. But I think there’s a way not to forget history in an absolutely less prominent way.”
Five years later, in June 2020, the Davis statue was nevertheless stripped of the roundabout.
A statue of Jefferson Davis is located on the grounds of the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., where McConnell and members of Congress work.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently proposed that these Confederate statues be removed from the Capitol. McConnell, on the other hand, said the resolution belongs to individual states, which have the option of the statues they wish to exhibit.
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“But what I think is obviously too far a bridge is this absurdity that we want to touch up the Capitol and everyone years ago who had a connection to slavery,” he told reporters in June. “Look, as far as the statues are concerned, each state has two. Any state can make an exchangeArray … if you wish, and some do it for one explanation or another.”
But he said he agreed to rename army bases known as Confederate army officers; President Donald Trump opposes it.
“If it’s convenient to take another look at those names, I agree with that,” McConnell said. “Whatever the final decision, I have no challenge.”
Contact journalist Morgan Watkins at [email protected]; Twitter: Morganwatkins26.