The Ghost of Orval Faubus

The South is not the Confederacy. The Confederacy was not the South. The Confederacy was a cabal of very rich, politically powerful men who ordered young men under their sway to take up arms against what they regarded as the deep state of their day. They stirred up the people who depended on them for leadership and protection and in the end over a quarter million young southern men never returned to their homes and families. I honor the South, including those young men who died for those rich men's ambitions. I have no use for the Confederacy that ordered those young men to impale themselves on the horns of an obscene and evil cause.

This song, “The Ghost of Orval Faubus,” is a reference to the 1957 school integration crisis at Little Rock’s Central High School when Governor Faubus ordered the Arkansas National Guard to deploy and prevent nine black teenagers from entering Central High to attend class because they were black. President and former five star U.S. Army General Dwight D. Eisenhauer sent in the 101st Airborne Division and federalized the guard with orders to stand down. Orval Faubus invoked the Confederacy in an attempt to keep the foot of a dead cabal on the neck of the oppressed. The treachery and treasonous bigotry he embraced are alive today but the South is not the Confederacy. The Confederacy was not the South.