Reconstruction lasted well into the mid 20th Century, I know, I lived it.

Now I know this is not directly Civil War related, however, I wondered if anybody else had the following experience. I was talking to an old friend from Southern Alabama who moved away to a mid-west state and the same time I moved to California in the mid to late 1960s. We both had the same experience at the same time, hundreds of miles apart. After we had enrolled into our new schools we were singled out to be put into a special class for speech issues. We were both the same age, about 10 years old. I remember I didn't like this class, we had to practice saying our vowels, consonants and word sounds like we were Yankees. After several classes I refused to go, and since it was done without my parents permission-- the school didn't make much of an issue of forcing me to go. My old friend had the exact same experience and rebelled against his teachers for sending him to this special class. We didn't realized what they were doing then until we talked today about this tonight. They were attempting to remove our Southern accents! His experience was more involved because they hooked him up to a special device that exercise his speech patterns to erase his "yall" from his vocabulary!. We are both proud to say this cultural bigotry did not work and our accents are just as strong as ever ....YALL!

David Upton