The reality of the Confederate flag legacy
I have seen more Confederate flags flying in the past couple of weeks than I have seen in years. A few days ago, I was at the grocery store and saw a young fellow with a Confederate flag waving above the tailgate of his truck. As he pulled out of his parking space, another guy walking by said something to him — I couldn’t hear what — and then gave him a big smile and a thumbs up.
The next day, I saw another man on the side of a busy stretch of road selling Confederate flags nearly the size of bedsheets. I have no way of knowing for sure, but I really doubt that he needed the money. It’s not about that. It’s about making a statement, and that statement, in a nutshell, is, well, choose your own favorite expression of southern-fried defiance. “Up Yours,” “Kiss My Grits,” or maybe something slightly more pointed.
The “heritage versus hate” debate over the symbolic meaning of the Confederate flag has been simmering for years, but it came to a boil recently when South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley announced that she would push for the flag to be removed from the State House grounds in the wake of the shooting of eight parishioners and a state senator in the Emmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on June 17. The man who was charged with nine counts of murder allegedly said that he did it in order “to start a race war.” In the days following his arrest, photographs emerged with him holding the Confederate flag, which added fuel to the fire.
In a matter of a couple of days, Walmart announced it was pulling Confederate flag-themed merchandise from its shelves, NASCAR requested that fans keep the flag away from its next event, and TV Land chose to drop “The Dukes of Hazzard” from its weekly lineup.
What might have been — and perhaps still could be — an opportunity to have a serious and productive discussion about race and the complexities of American history, has instead become a parody of the Civil War itself, with battle lines being drawn and skirmishes breaking out all over the place as each side digs in to defend its own position, with very little attempt to understand the other side’s point of view.
Symbolism can be a tricky thing. I do not doubt the sincerity of those who fly the Confederate flag proudly, believing with all of their hearts that the flag represents the qualities they ascribe to the South: a connection with the land (the agrarian way of life and what remains of it), a sense of community and family, a fierce loyalty and independence, southern hospitality and a slower pace of life, an appreciation of good food and sweet tea, a love of the simple things, an inherent skepticism of “outsiders who think they know better,” a general resistance to change, and a white-hot hatred of political correctness.
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For these folks, the flag represents a form of rebellion that is not racial, but regional. They are sick and tired of being told that they are inferior, sick and tired of being portrayed in popular culture as bumpkins. Anytime a character in a movie or on television has a Southern accent, we can be sure that an unflattering stereotype is soon to follow.
Of course, the problem is that there is a deeper and darker history surrounding the Confederate flag that just cannot be “cropped out” of the picture. Everyone, even its supporters, knows that the flag has been used by hate groups of all kinds since the Ku Klux Klan.
But it is not just that. The flag was used in South Carolina in the 1960s to protest integration. When President Harry Truman was pushing the country toward civil rights in 1948, it was South Carolina’s own Strom Thurmond who led a contingent of segregationist Democrats out of the convention to form the Dixiecrats, a party whose primary reason for being was to block the advance of civil rights in the South.
“There’s not enough troops in the Army to force the Southern people to … admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches,” said Thurmond upon accepting the Dixiecrats’ nomination for president.
That, unfortunately, is also a part of the South’s heritage. Have you noticed that while armchair historians have cooked up a revisionist history of the Civil War that pretends that slavery was barely a consideration at all, no one seems interested in tackling what happened over the next hundred years? Maybe that history is just a little too close for comfort, and not quite so easily romanticized.
Just remember, when you wave that flag, you are honoring that legacy, too.
(Chris Cox is a writer and teacher who lives in Haywood County. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..)
