Few blacks attend Civil War anniversary events - USATODAY.com: CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — As cannons thudded around Charleston Harbor this week in commemoration of the start of the war that extinguished slavery, the audiences for the 150th-anniversary events were nearly all-white. Even black scholars lecturing about black Union troops and the roots of slavery gazed out mostly on white faces.
The reasons blacks stayed away are not exactly a mystery: Across Dixie, Civil War commemorations have tended to celebrate the
Confederacy and the battlefield exploits of those who fought for the slaveholding South.
But the National Park Service is trying to make anniversary events over the next four years more hospitable to black people.
