If you are a Southerner with Confederate ancestors, you are subjected to persecution and intimidation just because of your ethnic and national origins. But not to worry, because Kirk D. Lyons, an attorney working for an organization called the Southern Legal Resource Center, has your back:

With roughly one week until census forms are due, a group of Confederate rights activists is urging southerners with Confederate ancestors to declare themselves “Confederate Southern Americans” on census forms in order to qualify for national origin protection under the 1964 Civil Rights Act.Federal law makes it illegal to discriminate because of a person’s birthplace, ancestry, culture or language. The South North Carolina-based Southern Legal Resource Center believes that people with ancestors who were citizens of the Confederate States of America should be entitled to ethnic identity and protection since the country no longer exists.

Question 9 of the census form asks respondents to identify their race and lists White, Black/African American/Negro, American Indian, Native Alaskan, Japanese and Korean as options, among others. But it also leaves a box with 19 blank spaces for anyone who wants to write in another race not listed.

“Fill in ‘Confed Southern Am.’ … This will put your Confederate nationality on the record. It’s just that simple,” SLRC Chief Trial Counsel Kirk D. Lyons says in a video posted on YouTube (see above) and Facebook.

Lyons continues: “We can start the process to give the southern community here in America a voice again, so that our concerns will be heard, and so that we will stop being harassed and persecuted because we are proud of our southern and Confederate ancestry.” The group has defended teachers and other activists who have been fired or disciplined in other ways for refusing to remove the Confederate flag from classrooms and other public places.

Kathy Kattenburg

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