Is Lee County Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass Neo-Confederate or a member of a hate group?

Editorial – by the Lehigh Acres Gazette editorial board  

According to the Anti-Defamation League and the Southern Poverty Law Center, the list of the Neo-Confederate groups is Abbeville Institute, Council of Conservative Citizens, Flaggers (Confederate flag erectors), Ku Klux Klan (1st and 3rd incarnations), League of the South, Sons of Confederate Veterans, Southern Party (defunct) and United Daughters of the Confederacy.

Neo-Confederacy also incorporates advocacy of traditional gender roles, is hostile toward democracy, strongly opposes homosexuality, and exhibits an understanding of race that favors segregation and suggests white supremacy.

According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Neo-Confederate group Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV) has members who are serving military officers, elected officials, public employees, and a particular national security expert with “Department of Defense Secret Security Clearance.”

Records show that Lee County Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass received campaign donations from the Sons of Confederate Veterans in 2017 and 2018.

The Sons of Confederate Veterans is open to all male descendants of any veteran who served honorably in the Confederate armed forces. Membership can be obtained through either direct or collateral family lines and kinship to a veteran must be documented genealogically.

As the conversation around Confederate memorials intensify —what they stand for, and whether they should stand at all—grows increasingly turbulent, the SCV sees itself as a home for those Donald Trump described in his post-Charlottesville press conference as “very fine people”: patriots who might march alongside Klansmen and neo-Nazis in defense of a statue yet who disavow bigotry and violence. With monuments tumbling to the earth or replaced in Ft. Myers, Baltimore, Orlando, Lakeland, Louisville, and elsewhere, these self-appointed protectors of Southern heritage find themselves balanced on a moral high wire. Can you love Stonewall Jackson and shun white supremacy? Can a neo-Confederate be a “very fine person”?

SCV also owns the childhood home of Nathan Bedford Forrest. In the late Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest — a millionaire Memphis slave trader before the war, an apparent war criminal who presided over the massacre of surrendering black prisoners at Fort Pillow, Tenn., during it, and the first grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan afterward, when the Klan’s terrorist violence paved the way to a Jim Crow South.

Chief among those holding to the fantasy of a Confederate Battle Flag absent its racist heritage are members of the Sons of Confederate Veterans (SCV), an organization that has long shielded itself from criticism by arguing its support of Confederate history is fueled by an abiding respect for heritage.

But that distinction has become less clear as attacks on the Confederate battle flag and monuments have grown, and organizations like the SCV have found allies in the hate-filled corners of neo-Confederacy. Despite the SCV’s denouncement of white supremacists and racists, leaders from known hate groups have been welcomed to events and been given the chance to speak and recruit.

But alongside these members are others who participated in and committed acts of violence at 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and others who hold overlapping membership in violent neo-Confederate groups such as the League of the South (LoS).

The group, organized as a federation of state chapters, has recently made news for increasingly aggressive campaigns against the removal of Confederate monuments. This has included legal action against states and cities, the flying of giant Confederate battle flags near public roadways, and Confederate flag flyovers at Nascar races.

SCV’s attempts to preserve Confederate monuments have become more difficult in the face of intensifying demands for their removal since the rise of the anti-racist Black Lives Matter movement.

 SCV in 2020 rededicated removed statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan founder Nathan Bedford Forrest at its National Confederate Museum in Columbia, Tennessee.

Is Lee County Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass a member of a Neo-Confederate or member of a hate group? Why would he take money from a known group? Why didn’t he just return the donation?

Alongside these SCV members, however, are others who have overlapping membership in more explicitly racist or violent groups, or who have been involved in political violence in and around Ft Myers.

In the 72-page report was done as a result of an audit by the Freeh Group. Which was performed on the Ft Myers Police department in May 2016, two appendices were initially kept from the public and are now released with heavy redactions.

It’s a wonder that the SCV or any of the named Neo-Confederate groups are in the report. Was Pendergrass named in the report, as he was on the Ft Myers Police Department in a former life?

Why didn’t he just return the campaign donation?

Editor’s note:

Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass tried to personally attack the Lehigh Acres Gazette Editor on Facebook, but Pendergrass will not talk about the money he took from the Sons of Confederate Veterans why?

We have banned Commissioner Cecil Pendergrass from the Lehigh Acres Gazette Facebook page, until he apologies to our editor.