On April 19, 2019, a man—who, in his profile picture, wears a hat emblazoned with the Confederate battle flag—posted in a Facebook group called “Black Confederates and Other Minorities in the War of Northern Aggression,” which has more than 2,000 members. “Heads up y'all there's gonna be a book coming out in sept saying black confederates are a myth,” he wrote. “Be prepared to give a negative review on amazon when it's released.” “I damned sure will,” another man immediately replied.
SEARCHING FOR BLACK CONFEDERATES: THE CIVIL WAR'S MOST PERSISTENT MYTH by Kevin M. LevinThe University of North Carolina Press 240 pp., $30.00
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Within this online community, the publication of Kevin M. Levin's excellent book, Searching for Black Confederates: The Civil War's Most Persistent Myth, is nothing less than a declaration of war. In the last several decades, Levin writes, a growing number of people have begun to accept as fact claims that between 500 and 100,000 black soldiers fought in racially integrated units in the Confederate Army. There are hundreds of web sites, legions of online communities, and whole books devoted to perpetuating these claims. Billboards reading “75,000 Confederates of color?” have recently appeared in Missouri, and one fourth-grade Virginia history textbook asserted that “thousands of Southern blacks fought in Confederate ranks.”
