Confederate Memorial Day

And a girl gets married.

It's Confederate Day.

It's like the Memorial Day for the South.

It's a Saturday around noon.

She worked in the National Pencil Company for about almost a year.

On April 26, Confederate Memorial Day, she wanted to go to the pencil factory where Leo Frank was the superintendent of the factory and pick up her paycheck of $1.20, and she never came home.

On April 27th at 3 o'clock, the night watchman, Newt Lee, who had only been there for a few Saturdays, found her body.

She was horribly raped, and she was strangled to death.

I don't want to be a Confederate.

Oh, but I'll celebrate Confederate Day, but we killed thousands of people.

Because you wanted states' rights.

It's just baffling to me.

That's HelloAlma.com slash P-R-E-A-M-B-L-E. It's Saturday, April 26th, 1913.

Confederate Memorial Day.

A southern holiday creating happy chaos in the streets of Atlanta despite the clouds and drizzle, with parades and games and what seems like the entire city out and about in their Sunday best.

Leo Frank, however, was at work in the pencil factory, finishing the week's reports.

She wanted to get her week's pay before going to the parade, so she stopped by the office of the pencil factory to pick up her money.

Newt Lee, the night watchman at the pencil factory, was also at work that day and had arrived early, but his boss Leo asked him to come back later.

Newt, who had been born into enslavement, was understandably not eager to celebrate Confederate Memorial Day, so he found a place to take an afternoon nap and then went back a few hours later to start his shift.

None of these little moments, Newt arriving early, an angry employee looking for his shoes, Mary going to pick up her money, would have been significant if not for what happened next.

He was also one of the founders of the Ku Klux Klan in Georgia, although he lied through his teeth in the KKK hearings of 1871 about it.

But John B. Gordon, by the 1890s, became one of the most ubiquitous and popular Confederate Memorial Day speakers, He got up to respond to Commander Shaw, and this is a final passage in what he John B. Gordon, 1900, head of the UCV, United Confederate Veterans.

When he tells me and my southern comrades that teaching our children that the cause for which we fought and our comrades died is all wrong, I must earnestly protest.

In the name of the future manhood of the South, I protest.