Tag: NASCAR

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News The Fly-By

MEMernet: NCRM at NASCAR, Mask Up Memphis

NCRM Shines at NASCAR (Yes, NaSCAR)

Denny Hamlin’s #11 FedEx Camry had a new look when he took to the Talladega track last weekend. The all-black paint scheme carried but one logo on the hood: the National Civil Rights Museum.

“I promised to listen and that’s what I’m doing,” Hamlin said in a tweet. “Today you will see my #11 car will not carry the traditional paint scheme that you usually see. @FedEx and myself instead want to give that voice to the @NCRMuseum.”

The tweet came along with photos of Hamlin inside the Memphis museum.

The move came a week after NASCAR banned Confederate flags from events. The steps forward came with a huge move back as a noose was found in the Talladega garage of Bubba Wallace, NASCAR’s first black driver.

Mask Up Memphis

A new website went live last week in an effort to distribute preventative literature and masks to the “underprivileged.” Mask Up and Live comes largely from the work of Rep. Karen Camper and Senator Raumesh Akbari “to dispel misinformation about wearing masks to help flatten the curve of COVID-19 among African Americans.”

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Take ’Em Down

The protests and marches all over the country in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police have once again roused the zombie corpse of the Confederacy — and have once again brought to the surface the ugly truth: Many Americans still venerate the racist, traitorous, losing side of a brief and bloody civil war that happened more than 150 years ago. 

Statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest, formerly in Memphis

Thousands of Americans wave Confederate flags and wear Confederate T-shirts and ball caps and put Confederate bumper stickers on their cars and trucks. They are outraged when it is suggested that statues honoring the leaders of this rebellion against the United States should be taken down. They fiercely defend their heroes as paragons of “history” and “heritage,” not hate. The truth is, these Americans are insensitive and ignorant at best, racist at worst.

They’re right in one regard: There is history in the country’s Confederate monuments and statues, but it has little to do with honoring war heroes and Southern heritage. It’s instead a history of ugly politics, intimidation, and a not-so-subtle reinforcement of segregation. According to Mark Elliott, a history professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, “The vast majority of [Confederate monuments and statues] were built between the 1890s and 1950s, which matches up exactly with the era of Jim Crow segregation.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center says there are around 1,500 Confederate memorials, statues, and other public memorabilia in 31 states in the U.S. Reminder: There were 11 states in the Confederacy. So why are there Confederate memorials in Idaho, Kansas, Arizona, and 17 other states that have no connection to the Confederacy, no reason to celebrate a Southern “heritage” that included human slavery? I wonder, don’t you?

And I wonder why a statue of Jefferson Davis would be erected in a downtown Memphis park in 1964. Could it be because the nascent civil rights movement was gathering steam across the country and a new statue of ol’ Jefferson Finis Davis, the president of the Confederacy (who wasn’t from Memphis), would serve to let the uppity locals know just who was still in charge? (Wink, wink. Remember when we owned y’all? Those were some good times, a way down yonder in the land of cotton!) Heritage!

Elliott again: “All of those monuments were there to teach values to people. That’s why they put them in the city squares. That’s why they put them in front of state buildings.” Many earlier memorials had instead been placed in cemeteries. Jim Crow brought them front and center.

The values these monuments stood for, he says, included a “glorification of the cause of the Civil War.” That’s why, to name two more examples, Georgia redesigned its state flag to include the Confederate battle flag in 1956, and why South Carolina placed the Confederate flag atop its capitol building in 1962.

The bottom line: Most Confederate monuments and statuary were not put up to venerate and preserve history. They were put up to make a political statement. That’s why taking them down — also a political statement — is happening, and why it is justified.

The bottom line: Most Confederate monuments and statuary were not put up to venerate and preserve history. They were put up to make a political statement. That’s why taking them down — also a political statement — is happening, and why it is justified.

It’s why even such a bastion of Southern culture as NASCAR decided to ban the Confederate flag at its races. The organization had become uncomfortable with the political baggage that comes with the stars and bars, a symbol that says that you’re okay with — in fact, you even celebrate — the “heritage” of owning human beings as slaves.

NASCAR isn’t exactly cutting-edge “woke,” but the organization clearly can see the writing on the wall. The future does not look bright for the Confederacy. At long last. More than 150 symbols of the Confederacy have been taken down in the past five years, including those in Memphis. And more will fall in coming months and years. Count on it.

If you still see de-glorifying the Confederacy as a problem, let me suggest that you reconsider the wisdom of building a lifestyle and value system around a losing war that consumed four years and three months of your great-great-great-great-grandparents’ lives more than 150 years ago. The Walking Dead has lasted 10 years, more than twice as long. 

Let me further suggest that you stop and consider that that flag on your truck or your T-shirt is the symbol of a traitorous rebellion built around defending the horrific concept of owning human beings like livestock, putting human beings in chains and selling them at auction, separating human beings from their families, beating them, breeding them, putting them in deplorable housing, and lynching them at will.

It’s a shameful, revolting heritage. Those statues and busts and monuments you revere as history glorify the worst aspects of humankind, and are a recurring insult to millions of African Americans. It’s a history we need to study and learn from; it’s not a history we should honor in our public spaces.

Take ’em down.

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From My Seat Sports

“Earnhardt Nation” — The Intimidator Lives

Dale Earnhardt would have put a bumper to the devil if need be.
– from Earnhardt Nation (Harper) by Jay Busbee

I’ll start this column with a comparison, one I don’t take lightly in making from Memphis, Tennessee. Dale Earnhardt was the Elvis Presley of NASCAR. Richard Petty, of course, is known far and wide as “The King,” but the fact is, Petty has lived too long (78 years) to achieve the brand of legend Elvis did in dying so young (42). But the Intimidator? Earnhardt died in the most dramatic fashion in American sports history: a wreck on the final lap of NASCAR’s Super Bowl, the 2001 Daytona 500. He was two months shy of his 50th birthday when pulled from the wreckage of his iconic number-3 Chevy. There will be no pictures of an old Dale Earnhardt. He was Elvis in a fire suit. And he died racing.

Jay Busbee has written the definitive book on Earnhardt’s life, racing career, and death. Earnhardt Nation goes even further, as it blends the rise of Earnhardt’s son (Dale Jr.) as NASCAR’S most popular driver with the growth of a sport that continues to tease calamity as new heroes chase checkered flags and the seven-figure paychecks that come with them.

It’s a brilliant book, really, as you don’t need to be a gear-head to fully appreciate Earnhardt’s place in American pop-culture history. Busbee provides context for the Earnhardt family’s place in racing history, with patriarch Ralph actually fueling the proverbial engine his son and grandson would rev to heights unseen by many athletes in more mainstream sports. (Busbee studied journalism at the University of Memphis and has written for Memphis magazine. He now calls Atlanta home.)

He was driving on instinct, balls, and will.

Books about auto racing — more specifically NASCAR — don’t fill shelves the way baseball, boxing, or golf literature does. Which makes Busbee’s tome so important, even educational. Now and then a sports book resets the standard for its genre. Think The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn (about the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers) or John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink (Bobby Knight and the 1985-86 Indiana Hoosiers). Likewise, Earnhardt Nation brings to life a phenomenon appreciated even more in hindsight — in death — than it was as Earnhardt was piling up Winston Cup championships a quarter-century ago.

Racing, a sport that combined grit and daredevil grace with a chance to make a few bucks and pose with some pretty women in Victory Lane, stood at the center of the South’s rebirth.

The Earnhardt family was and is quintessentially Southern. Not unlike Elvis Presley’s. Its fan base would color an entire map of the United States, but the density of its devotion — particularly to the Number 3 car — would be heaviest here in the American South. Blue-collar. Rural. Largely white. It’s a fan base powerful enough to once attract the sponsor of all sponsors — Budweiser — to Junior’s team, and without a single season championship to the driver’s credit. All he needed was that name (its own brand), a heavy right foot, and that country smile for stand-up posters.

The All-Star race freed Earnhardt to unleash the last bits of bastard in himself. If his rival drivers failed to catch him, hell, it was their fault for not trying hard enough.

No driver has caught Dale Earnhardt, not even his extraordinarily popular son. He’s passed into the realm of legends, and his story will be told long after the automotive industry is again transformed. (Among the tragic ripples of Earnhardt’s premature death is never having a quote from the Intimidator about the concept of driverless cars.) Like Elvis, Earnhardt was a flawed human being, and by a few measures. But what he did well, he did better than anyone else. And with a style that makes for great reading.