Georgia Representative Benton Should Resign for Supporting the KKK
- by: Susan V
- recipient: Georgia Representative Thomas Benton
Georgia House Representative Tommy Benton says he’s fed up with people trying to wipe out the South’s Confederate history and he’s introduced some bills to deal with his frustration. But is this what the people of the South really need most right now - more Confederate memorials?
According to several news reports, not only is Benton calling for holidays for Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis and insisting that all of Stone Mountain Park be set aside as “an appropriate and suitable memorial for the Confederacy;" he wants some of the roads named for Martin Luther King Jr. changed back. And he talks about the Klan as if they deserve a shrine of their own.
Benton's bills come after an interview last summer with the Atlanta Journal Constitution in which he reportedly said the Klan “was not so much a racist thing but a vigilante thing to keep law and order,” and that it “made a lot of people straighten up,” he added.
Anyone who takes the time to read the 1871 Congressional inquiry into the acts of terrorism committed against blacks and any white person that either tried to educate or have a relationship with a person of African ancestry could not possibly characterize Klan activity as keeping “law and order.”
In the midst of one of the most racially troubled times since the Civil Rights Movement, Benton seems set on honoring white supremacy, and that’s not what this country or even Georgia needs ever, especially right now.
Anyone making excuses for Klan vigilante activity doesn’t belong in a leadership position. Sign this petition to demand that Benton resign!
To Georgia Representative Thomas Benton;
Dear Sir:
Aside from your reprehensible and clearly uneducated comments about the Ku Klux Klan’s vigilante activities, particularly those that went on during Reconstruction, your bills make it appear that the South actually needs more memorials and reminders of those dark days of white supremacist tyranny.
It seems as if, before the South can barely get beyond the racism and oppression of the past, you want to revive it. The same nostalgic amnesia, revived by white supremacist politicians using “Lost Cause “ rhetoric, was a big part of the scheme that brought Jim Crow to the South just over a century ago.
Furthermore, the South is certainly not lacking in Civil War memorials - they’re all over the place. I have personally driven all over the state of North Carolina and found that even the remotest tiniest towns, ones that don’t even have a decent restaurant or market with fresh produce where townspeople can have access to basic nutritional needs, has standing, nevertheless, usually in the center of town, a Confederate Memorial, commemorating the “Lost Cause.”
While you may be justified in asking that certain standing memorials and historical paintings not be defaced or destroyed, this is no time to attempt to take the South back to those dark days by making apologies for the indefensible, cruel and tyrannical acts of the KKK.
DiversityInc says Soutern Poverty Law Center has described the KKK as “"the most infamous — and oldest — of American hate groups" And the group’s activities far surpassed those of enforcing law and order: 'Lynchings, tar-and-featherings, rapes and other violent attacks on those challenging white supremacy became a hallmark of the Klan,' the SPLC describes."
I the undersigned, assert that your comments and suggestions cross the line when it comes to supporting your position in a leadership role, and you should resign.
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