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Ed Sebesta: President Obama, stop enabling neo-Confederates

Edward H. Sebesta, co-editor of The Confederate and Neo-Confederate Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) and Neo-Confederacy: A Critical Introduction (University of Texas Press, 2008), is soliciting co-signers for a letter to be mailed to President Obama on May 1, 2011, requesting that he cease allowing the United Daughters of the Confederacy to sponsor awards at U.S. service academies.

Mr. Sebesta describes the UDC as “one of the oldest and most powerful neo-Confederate organizations, [with] a long history of opposition to the values of a multiracial democratic United States of America.” He also notes that “[i]n recent years the UDC has promoted the neo-Confederate Southern Partisan magazine… [and] authors in UDC publications continue to correct what they state are American “misconceptions” about the horrors of slavery.”

The letter also calls upon the president to cease sending a wreath to the Confederate monument at Arlington National Cemetery on Memorial Day. You can read the full version here.

Mr. Sebesta is also the author a letter sent to President Obama requesting an end to federal recognition of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, published by the History News Network in May 2010.