Here's something you don't see every day

Former NAACP president vocally defends Confederate flag

NBC12 - WWBT - Richmond, VA News On Your Side

Hours after "Black Lives Matter" was spray-painted on a Confederate monument in Asheville, North Carolina, H.K. Edgerton stood with a Confederate flag, telling those passing by why he wanted it to continue to fly.

Edgerton, a former president of the North Carolina NAACP and one of few African-American members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, was outside the monument waving the Confederate flag soon after the graffiti was removed.

He said the graffiti artist protested incorrectly.

"I'm not going to blame it on a Yankee, because I've seen some southern folk around here that are real questionable too, that don't know anything about who they are and their families and the honorable people in the southland of America... red, yellow, black, white and brown!" Edgerton said.

Read more from NBC affiliate WYFF: http://bit.ly/1Ni43iG

I have known of present-day black Americans defending the CSA flag before (though very few!) but never of one such defender who is a former NAACP state president!

Between 3,000 - 10,000 black men were members of the CS Army. This represented about 0.5 percent of total CS Army members over the course of the war. (This according to a Harvard Univ. study.)

There were between 100K - 200K black Union soldiers (estimates vary wildly for some reason).

In the CS Army, both Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne of the Army of Tennessee and Gen. Robert E Lee called for enrolling blacks as soldiers long before the Confederate Congress authorized enrolling 300,000 black  troops only a month before Lee surrendered. Both generals urged that service would be rewarded, in the case of slaves, with automatic manumission. This the Congress did not authorize.

AFAIK, no one has been able to determine how many of the serving black were free or slave (there was quite a number of freed blacks living in the South before and during the Civil War).

The few blacks who did serve in the CS Army had no meaningful effect on the course of the war and were not accepted on anything approximating equal terms with the white soldiers.