By Dennis Galvin
The Grey Ghosts, the name of the Westford Academy Football team, was also the moniker for one of the Confederate Army’s most prodigious raiders during the civil war. Major John S. Mosby, a cavalry commander under General Robert E. Lee was so elusive, that he was dubbed “the gray ghost”.
Hollywood commemorated Mosby’s exploits with a 1950s televisions series called the “gray ghost”, which some believe inspired the name for the Westford Academy Football team.
The name of the team should be changed, now that it has been associated with a traitor. However, if we are serious about purging our society of every vestige that links us to the confederacy, slavery and racism, let’s be thorough.
Let’s confront the legacy of President Woodrow Wilson, an avowed racist and fan of D.W. Griffith’s movie, “Birth of Nations, which glorified and revived the Ku Kux Klan.
Wilson segregated the US Army.
Margaret Sanger, the founder of “Planned Parenthood”, initiated the “negro project” to reduce America’s African American population through abortion. Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “New Deal” was built upon white southern segregation. His infamous National Recovery Act, was known pejoratively as the “negro removal act”, because it allowed the exclusion of black workers from white unions.
In our time, Lyndon Banes Johnson inflicted serious damage to Black America through the welfare policies of his “Great Society”. Fearing the growth of
black political power, he sought to pacify tension, not rectify the injustice posed by racial discrimination. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman, who
like Governor Cuomo, resigned over sexual misconduct, abused his Sri Lankan girlfriend, referring to her as his “brown sex slave”.
President Joe Biden referred to the late Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, a former member of the Klan, as his mentor. Biden’s super predator legislation filled our jails and prisons for the past quarter century with young black men, convicted of minor crimes. Note a common link?
If the current concern over our racist legacy is legitimate, we must never forget that it was the Democratic party, not the Republican Party that gave rise to the confederacy. Judging from the record above, Howie Carr may have had a point when he wrote: “ you can take the Democrat out of the Confederacy, but you can’t take the Confederacy out of the Democrat. ”
Dennis Galvin is a Westford resident.
