Confederate Railroad Band Steaming Up Durham (CT)
Colin McEnroe
HARTFORD COURANT
Danny Shirley could have called his outlaw country band almost anything. The name he picked .. was Confederate Railroad. On Sept. 27, they'll perform on the last day of the Durham Fair, and some people don't think that's cool ...
... The nation has spent the past year engaged in the kind of reckoning it should have attempted long ago. Here in Connecticut, the Democrats dropped the names of Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson from their annual dinner, and Yale University is having perhaps its most momentous debate about one of its residential colleges, named for slavery proponent and white supremacist John C. Calhoun.
You shouldn't be glib about slavery ... But some element of our national character makes us incapable of repudiation. There's no fun, saucy, mainstream way to name a band in Germany after the Third Reich or one in South Africa after apartheid. In the United States, we've kept one friendly foot in the worst part of our history.
Just for the record, the Confederate railroad system was a mess. It had been shoddily constructed by a South that believed trains were good for getting cotton to market and not much else. It was a willfully uncoordinated patchwork of private companies whose lines often did not connect and were not even built in one universal gauge. So it's kind of a dumb name for anything ...
http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-mcenroe-durham-fair-confederate-0830-20150827-column.html
