Tim's Blind Spot

     Anyone who really knows me, knows my politics and my beliefs.       
     Anyone who doesn't can spend a little time searching this website, which I launched in 2007. You will quickly see my interests, my beliefs, and one major contradiction.
     I have long argued in favor removing the monuments that glorify the confederacy, especially during the days since George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, Minnesota. 
     There is no shortage of those monuments here in the Deep South state of Alabama. 
     I have also argued for renaming the two high schools in Montgomery that are named for confederate figures.

     Yet at the same time, since 2008 or so, I have helped curate a web site detailing the activities of another confederate: Alabama's Admiral Raphael Semmes.  

     The city of Mobile took down the statue of the Mobile native last night, without any notice. It was installed on June 27, 1900...120 years ago.

      I didn't know anything about Semmes till about 2007, when I interviewed the author of a book about him and the CSS Alabama, the ship he commanded and used to raid other ships during the Civil War. 
     The next thing you know there was talk of producing a documentary about Semmes. and that led to the creation of a website...   

https://cssalabama.blogspot.com/

 ...which as I write this, is still intact. But we've made it private, and removed my name from the editors list.
      Every now and then it would attract a reader researching the confederate navy, and there would be an exchange of emails. Other than that, the CSS Alabama website has been dormant.
     I'm donating the books I collected about Semmes and the CSS Alabama to the Department of Archives and history, where history is kept safe.
     I don't want to erase negative Alabama history, but I don't want to glorify it either.* The others involved in the documentary project say we should close it, but I'll ask if The State Archives wants to keep an electronic copy. 


*That's why there are statues and other memorials to the people marching on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but none "honoring" the Alabama State Troopers who beat the peaceful protestors marching across the bridge.