It's Jeff Davis's birthday: celebrate racism!
By Ed Kilgore
... Even Daviss home state of Mississippi, which he represented in Congress and where he died in 1889, no longer shuts down state government to honor the arch-traitor. But Alabama does.
As a Georgia state employee a generation ago, I can remember the trouble I took to arrange my schedule such that I was working at home or on the road on what was then a Davis holiday in my own state, embarrassed to let Yankee friends or work colleagues know about it. It was a shameful and retrograde commemoration then, and certainly still is. Unlike his traitor-in-arms Robert E. Lee, Davis cant be defended with the sort of weak rationalizations available to protect the legacy of the Lost Cause. Davis was by no means a military genius or a symbol of postwar reconciliation or some sort of icon of southern chivalry. He was a bigot who was convinced that civilization itself depended on the enslavement of African-Americans ...
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/06/celebrate-racism-its-jefferson-daviss-birthday-in-alabama.html