Confederate

LeVar Burton got a glimpse into his lineage in “Finding Your Roots” and discovered something about his ancestors that shocked him. The former “Reading Rainbow” host, freedom-to-read advocate and actor knew little about his lineage. He’d been estranged from his father, Levardis Robert Martyn Burton, since he was 11, and his mother, Erma Gene Christian, had been tight-lipped about her own history. Burton said it was “impossible” to get her to open-up about her upbringing. On the PBS series “Finding Your Roots,” host Henry…

Scotland’s foremost country music venue has voted narrowly to ban the use of the Confederate flag because of its “toxic” associations with slavery and white supremacy.Members of Glasgow’s Grand Ole Opry voted 50 to 48 to maintain a ban brought in by the venue’s managing committee last month. The emergency general meeting on Monday evening was the culmination of a bitter internal dispute that resulted in the resignation of the committee’s president two weeks ago.The row centred around the use of the red and blue cross in a…

Credit: Alauna Safarpour Roughly 160 years after the end of the Civil War, division among residents of the North and South lingers, according to researchers. Alauna Safarpour, a postdoctoral fellow at Northeastern University and participant in the COVID States Project, found that people from former Confederate states are more…