A Black Neo-Confederate ?

Black Man proud to be a racist, against blacks

H.K Edgerton made a little stop by Montgomery, Alabama to honor the five-year birthday of a 1,385 mile walk that he called, “The March through Dixie”.  The journey is a fundraiser stretching from his home in Ashville, North Carolina to Austin Texas.  Usually when taking that long march like this one might wear a exercise suit but Edgerton wore a gray Confederate soldier’s uniform.  But that’s not all he also came with a large Confederate flag mounted on a pole, over his right shoulder.  While in Montgomery, Edgerton was interviewed by the Post Confederate giving them some of his mislead perceptions on the KKK (Ku Klux Klan), the Civil War, and race relations between black and white southerners after the Civil War.  Here are just some of Edgerton’s assertions  

• Before the slaves were freed, “Black folks and white folks were family,” he said. “We did all kinds of things together here. White people and slaves saw each other on the streets and they tipped their hats to each other … and asked each other about their families.”
• “The War Between the States is not over. This thing is real!”
• “I don’t see [the Ku Klux Klan] as terrorists. I see them as — I hate to use the word ‘vigilante,’ but vigilante sometimes ain’t as bad as you think. When your government fails you and fails to protect you, you have to turn somewhere.”
• The KKK was “just protecting the people — all of the people, black and white. Blacks wanted to be a part of that.”
• “Why would a man tell my babies [that] walking into a classroom with a Confederate flag on [their clothing] that [that is] demonic, evil and offensive? Black folks in the South been living with that flag all our lives.”
• “It wasn’t so much about [then-Alabama Gov.] George Wallace going to the schoolhouse doors, saying, ‘No, you can’t integrate.’ The thought in his mind was, ‘No, you can’t tell me to integrate. Let us deal with this, and we’re gonna deal with it.’”
• Slaves “were given a new pair of pants and a new pair of shoes every day, and he thinks this white man was cruel! [Black slaves] had the same medical facilities that the white man had. … You look at most of the slave pictures … they are not raggedy and torn. They lived better than most! … Most of them looked better than most of the white folks around and lived better than most of the free world!”

Edgerton went on to say that it is white supremacists’ constitutional right to display a hangman’s noose wherever they saw fit.  Having this sort of opinion being a black man, Edgerton has named some allies like the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the Southern Legal Resource Center (SLRC), and SLRC head Kirk Lyons. Lyons is one of Edgerton’s odder allies. Lyons spent most of his career as a attorney defending white supremacists, and was married on the grounds of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations by its deceased leader in a ceremony in which villainous Klan leader Louis Beam was the best man. Despite that, until recently, Lyons regularly depicted Edgerton, who is the former head of the Asheville NAACP, as his good friend.)

But recently Lyons seemed to be distancing himself from Edgerton when he wrote, “The SLRC is not and has not been involved in any of H.K.’s travel or appearances for some time.” But Edgerton claimed he is still chairman emeritus of the SLRC’s board of advisers and insisted that there “never” was any dissension.  Lyons is just “a misunderstood man” Edgerton said. “If every bigot in America was Kirk Lyons, we’d never have another bigotry problem, ever.

After the interview was over Edgerton walked to a 2005 champagne-colored Cadillac DeVille and popped the trunk, revealing a wealth of Confederate flags, stickers and pamphlets.  The Sons of Confederate Veterans activist Elijah Coleman point the finger at Edgerton of the unauthorized sale and use of SCV-issued Confederate battle flags and asked for large amounts of money to buy a new car. 

Edgerton said the Cadillac belonged to his sister.