Slave Labor Day?

This seems like a particularly untimely moment to express sympathy for the Confederacy, but the tone of Virginia City’s Labor Day Parade may be changing in such a direction.

A group called Comstock Civil War Reenactors has a website that calls the celebration “Civil War Days” and contains an apologist version of the causes of the Civil War. It’s not clear whether the Reenactors speak for the Parade—a Virginia City Tourism Commission website still calls it the Labor Day Parade—but Sparks Tribune columnist Andrew Barbano accused the Reenactors of commemorating “Slave Labor Day.”

Reno’s Central Labor Council and individual unions have in the past promoted the VC parade. The first mining unions in the West began on the Comstock.