If you meet the on-life-support Confederacy, kill him.

In July 2014, following bitter controversy and discussions of concerns by African American students about the campus environment, the Washington and Lee University President Kenneth Ruscio announced that replica Confederate battle flags will be removed from the chapel that serves as a major meeting place.

Washington and Lee University was named for President George Washington and Confederate General Robert E. Lee who was the President of the university until his death in 1870. Lee is buried in a crypt beneath the landmark chapel.

The Civil War began on April 12, 1861 and ended when Robert E. Lee, Confederate General of the Army of Northern Virginia, surrendered to Union Army General Ulysses S. Grant on April 9, 1865, at the McLean House in the village of Appomattox Courthouse. Between 640,000 and 700,000 soldiers died in the Civil War, including over 360,000 Union soldiers and 260,000 Confederate soldiers.

It is this writer's opinion that the Civil War ended too soon. It ended before the South was truly defeated. The South comprised 11 Southern States that seceded from the Union and four states, namely, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky and Missouri that were also slave states wtih loyalty to the Confederacy but did not secede from the Union.

Because the South was not defeated in that war racists for generations thereafter passed black codes, laws designed to deny African Americans their constitutional rights; and emboldened the Ku Klux Klan, chief promoters of lynching and disenfranchisement of African Americans until the U.S. Congress enacted the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

Not only should the Civil War have lasted longer but when it ended Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederate States of America from February 18, 1861 to May 10, 1865, Robert E. Lee and other top generals of the Confederate Army should have been put on trial and received their just due. On March 4, 1865, just a few days over a month before the war ended, during his Second Inaugural Address President Abraham Lincoln said, "With malice toward none... let us strive on to finish the work we are in." This was interpreted by many, if not most, that Confederate War criminals Davis and Lee would not be prosecuted for their crimes against humanity.

My paternal Grandfather Benjamin Franklin Fields, Sr., the man who had the greatest impact on my life, was born on April 10, 1862, a year after the Civil War began. On June 17, 1894 he received a Homestead Claim that granted him 119 and 90/100ths acres of land, apparently with the signature of President Grover Cleveland and the seal of the General Land Office. This land is located in the hamlet of Sunflower, in Washington County, Alabama. My Grandfather, his three sons and their wives, and me, my fourteen siblings and my thirteen first cousins. All of whom were born and reared on this land. My Grandfather donated a part of the land for the Fields School that was established in 1933 and closed in 1949. The first eight years of my schooling was at that one-teacher school.

Before presenting a poem I wrote and asked my sister to read for my Grandfather, not long before his death, I feel compelled to say a word more about Robert E. Lee, but not about the replica Confederate flags that have been removed from the chapel at Washington and Lee University. I have a word to say about the Robert E. Lee statue placed in Lee Park, Charlottesville, Virginia where I am currently a resident.

In Lee Park, also referred to as a garden, located in the heart of Charlottesville, where many events are held, including the Alzheimer's Walk and Ceremony that I participated in, held there in October of this year, there is the brazen, heroic-sized bronze statue of Lee on a horse, Traveler, atop an oval-shaped granite pedestal surrounded with plantings. Every time I visit Lee Park I am reminded of the role Lee had in bringing suffering, death and causing African Americans to perpetually struggle. It reminds me that Lee's past is my present, and that for many others who share my common heritage.

I will now close with the tribute I wrote for my Grandfather shortly before his death.

To love the Earth you know for
greater knowing;
To lose the life you have for
full life;
To leave the friends you love for
heavenly loving and angelic fellowship:
To find a land more sweet than home
and more awesome than earth.
Behold! A wind is rising and rivers
are flowing;
Your soul too is rising and flowing:
You are communing with the wind
and rivers.
You, the wind and the rivers are one.

Farewell Grandpa!
Your Grandson,

Uriah Fields (Electronic mail, October 22, 2014)

P.S. Wherever any physical manifestation of the Confederacy exists let everyone who believes slavery was evil and that justice should be for all act according to his/her ability to abolish or remove every vestige of it from human view.