It strikes me that those who are defending the Confederate flag in the name of their Southern heritage are a little late. They should have defended it decades ago, kept it from being co-opted by the marauding Ku Klux Klan, by opportunist politicians like George Wallace and Ross Barnett, by neo-Nazi skinheads and other racists along the long march through history.
I am aware and sometimes proud of my own Southern heritage. Two of my great-great-grandfathers died fighting for the Confederacy. They were not slaveholders, but small farmers from Georgia who reluctantly left their homes and families, and considered themselves defending their homeland.
Let’s face it. The sons and daughters of Confederate veterans and similar heritage groups made a mistake by not disowning at every juncture the hate mongers who took a retired battle flag and used it in significantly different and newly racist battles.
Now the Stars and Bars not only stands for a culture that prospered off the backs of its fellow human beings, it stands for lynching and Jim Crow and segregated public facilities and murders at synagogues and Bible studies. It stands now for pure hate.
It seems impossible that this matter still remains under discussion. This is not rocket science. This is not complex. The flag fractures our society and causes great pain and unnecessary division. And the Southern heritage that some of us are part of should not now be defined by a flag that was resurrected to fight civil rights, not Civil War battles.
I went to Robert E. Lee High School in Montgomery, Ala., where we took down the flag and dropped the singing of “Dixie” my junior year after desegregation. At 16 and 17, we saw the wisdom in that.
I was visiting my mother in Alabama the weekend that the South Carolina governor called for taking down the flag over the statehouse. To get home to Mississippi, I drove about 260 miles, north through much of Alabama and finally west toward home. Along the way I encountered three pickups with giant Confederate flags flapping from their truck beds. I wondered if any one of the drivers could have answered the simple question: When was the Civil War fought? Or, even, how long did it last?
For anyone to argue that the flags flapping above Southern statehouses or from kids’ pickup trucks “honors” their ancestors is a joke. They honor no one and offend many.
Through the years I’ve written many columns about the Confederate flag. When it became an issue at Ole Miss. When my state of Mississippi voted against taking it off the state flag. When South Carolina had the same battle before.
It’s one of those obvious moral moves that society should make — should already have made — to improve itself and move forward. It is the right thing to do to put history in a museum and know that our Southern forebears who were good people would agree with that stance.
It is a tiresome issue. I hope never to write about the Confederate flag again, but, knowing history, I may be doomed to repeat it.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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