Birmingham Belles have second thoughts

Some of them anyway.  The Belles are an invitation-only organization of teenage girls who dress up in hoop-skirted dresses and are presented at Arlington House, a former  plantation home, the only one in Birmingham.  As reported in the Washington Post, some Belles and former Belles say that, in the context of the Black Lives Matter movement, they have come to see the organization as racially problematic.  One ex-Belle, Emily Owen Mendelsohn,  organized a Change.org petition to disband the Belles which has gathered 1600 signatures.  She told the Post reporter, “Glorifying the antebellum South, waving Confederate flags and saying the n-word are stepping stones to a knee on a Black man’s neck.  If we are not fighting this, then we are complicit to murder.”

As one commenter pointed out, the Belles’ antebellum nostalgia was in any case the height of absurdity. The city of Birmingham was founded during Reconstruction as an industrial hub, and didn't even exist before or during the Civil War era.