From the CivilWarPhila Digest, with thanks to author Joe Bilby

Subject: Bill would require Paid 

Confederate Holiday in SC

Feb 3, 7:32 PM (ET)

By JIM DAVENPORT
COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) - A black state senator is pushing a bill that would require 
South Carolina cities and counties to give their workers a paid day off for 
Confederate Memorial Day or lose millions in state funds.

Democratic Sen. Robert Ford's bill won initial approval from a Senate 
subcommittee Tuesday. It would force county and municipal governments to follow 
the schedule of holidays used by the state, which gives workers 12 paid days 
off, including May 10 to honor Confederate war dead. Mississippi and Alabama 
also recognize Confederate Memorial Day.

Years ago, Ford said, he pushed a bill to make both that day and Martin Luther 
King Jr. Day paid holidays. He considered it an effort to help people understand 
the history of both the civil rights movement and the Confederacy in a state 
where the Orders of Secession are engraved in marble in the Statehouse lobby, 
portraits of Confederate generals look down on legislators in their chambers and 
the Confederate flag flies outside.

"Every municipality and every citizen of South Carolina, should be, well, forced 
to respect these two days and learn what they can about those two particular 
parts of our history," Ford said Tuesday.

In a state steeped in a segregationist past, "there's no love in this state 
between black and white basically," he said. That's not apparent at the 
Statehouse, where black and white legislators get along, "but if you go out 
there in real South Carolina, it's hatred and I think we can bring our people 
together."

Lonnie Randolph, president of the state conference of NAACP branches, objected 
to that reasoning. "Here Senator Ford is talking about the importance of race 
relations by forcing recognition of people who did everything they could to 
destroy another race - particularly those that look like I do," Randolph said. 
"You can't make dishonor honorable. It's impossible."

Ron Dorgay, a Sons of Confederate Veterans member from Elgin, said race 
relations have moved far from hatred but he hopes Ford's bill brings more 
understanding of the state's past. "Even in school systems, they don't teach the 
correct history," Dorgay said.

Local governments, meanwhile, are seeing green, not race, when it comes to 
adding holidays to their calendars. Large and small counties would put up more 
cash to cover holidays they don't now recognize, largely for law enforcement and 
emergency worker overtime, municipal and county association lobbyists said.

Only 10 of the state's 46 counties recognize Confederate Memorial Day and only 
27 observe the more benign Presidents' Day.

Greenville County, one of the state's wealthiest and most populous counties, 
doesn't offer the Confederate holiday. The Judiciary Committee said the county 
would spend $156,900 to add each holiday to its calendar. Much smaller Laurens 
County would spend $37,080.Ford dismissed the costs.

"The good outweighs any kind of rationale you can come up with," he said before 
the subcommittee sent the bill forward to the full Senate Judiciary Committee 
for debate, which won't happen until at least next week.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, supports the 
bill - and holding back chunks of the more than $300 million the state sends 
local governments each year.

Counties and cities "should be respectful of that as political subdivisions of 
the state," said McConnell, a Civil War re-enactor who runs a Charleston 
Confederate wares gallery and on Tuesday fretted how new junk metal collection 
legislation might affect his cannon. "If they don't want to be a subdivision of 
the state, then don't take the money." 

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