2. The speech by Rebecca Felton in 1897 instigated racial violence in Wilmington, NC that left an unknown number of innocent black men dead (official deaths were 11, some say there were actually hundreds).

“If it takes lynching to protect women’s dearest possession from drunken ravening
human beasts, then I say lynch a thousand a week if it becomes necessary.”

Rebecca Felton was an extremist, even by the standards of her day.

Mr. Wellborn, as an “amateur historian, either you have not read any of Mrs. Felton’s racist screeds or you approve of them. I choose to believe that you have not done your homework, because no responsible Georgia citizen in the year 2009 could condone tying to a man to a tree, torturing, immersing him in kerosene and setting him on fire while still alive, followed by the mutilation of his charred corpse and the sale of his body parts as souvenirs, as hundreds stood by and cheered. If Sam Hose (not “Horse,” as recounted by y0u) was in fact guilty of the crimes of which he was accused, he deserved a fair trial and execution by hanging or electrocution. That’s how a civilized society metes out justice.

As for the Rev. Dr. Andrew Sledd, he was a conservative Methodist minister from Virginia who was so appalled by the mob lynching of Hose that he witnessed in 1902 that it changed the course of his life. Thereafter, he became an outspoken critic of racial violence in the South. He was certainly not the self-loathing Southerner of your description. Sledd was a devout man of God, who actually believed in segregation, but was sickened by lynch-mob “justice.”

Your snarky comments about his “exile” in Florida lack any semblance of scholarly understanding, and again, you have clearly not done your homework. Sledd had offers to serve as the president of Stanford and other notable schools. He served as the president of the new University of Florida from 1905 to 1909, and thereafter as president of Birmingham-Southern University, taught in the Vanderbilt divinity school, and later became the first Professor of New Testament studies at Emory’s Candler School of Theology in 1914. A Virginian by birth and upbringing, he arned an M.A. in Greek from Harvard and a Ph.D. in Latin from Yale. He was a man of learning and substance, who could not abide the cruelty of his fellow man.

Rebecca Felton, on the other hand, stands convicted by her own words of being a racist, an advocate of lynch mob justice, and a demagogue. Mrs. Felton, who “served” as a U.S. Senator for 24 hours in a public relations stunt, when the U.S. Senate was not even in session (not the several days cited by you), is an embarrassing skeleton in Georgia’s closet, and richly deserves to be forgotten, if not roundly condemned, for the immoral actions she condoned and advocated.

Good God, man, get some perspective!

May God rise up more honest men and women like her in the Future, to shake off the shackles of an ‘Obamanation.’