Anyone interested in the history of our country will benefit by reading “The Dogs of War: 1861” (Oxford University Press, 2011, 128 pages).

J.D. Moore started his first year at Tuscola in 1999. He was an athlete, played football and basketball. He learned pretty quickly the parts of the school that he needed to avoid, parts where the rebel flag was more ubiquitous and racial slurs were directed at him more frequently. 

Cullowhee Valley School will no longer be represented by the Rebel mascot, which is personified by an old, white, confederate general.

Two women presented a petition to the Jackson County School Board during an Oct. 27 meeting asking the board to consider retiring the Rebel mascot at Cullowhee Valley School. 

For the second week in a row, many small Western North Carolina communities have seen demonstrations in response to the killing of North Carolina-born Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of the city’s police force. 

Just weeks after a violent “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville last August, complaints arising from the display of Confederate imagery in the Town of Canton’s 111th annual Labor Day parade prompted an alderman to propose regulating the display of controversial speech in town-sponsored events. 

It’s been a hot topic for almost a year now, but the role of Confederate imagery in contemporary society is no more settled than it was last summer, when riots in Charlottesville, Virginia, brought the issue to small towns across the country. 

When Canton Alderman Dr. Ralph Hamlett recently proposed a parade entry policy that would limit inappropriate speech during the town’s two annual parades — and in effect limit the display of the Confederate Flag — it understandably generated a substantial amount of negative comments.

When a policy that would prohibit the display of the Confederate flag in a tiny mountain mill town’s municipal parades was first proposed, it was immediately identified as both a sensitive cultural issue and a thorny Constitutional question that cast the Western North Carolina municipality as a microcosm of the complex national debate over the role of Confederate imagery in society today.

By the faculty of Western Carolina University’s Department of Anthropology and Sociology

Recent events in Charlottesville, Virginia, demonstrate the inability and unwillingness of the U.S. to deal with issues of race and racism. When neo-Confederates, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist groups freely assemble to promote not free speech but violence in the face of a Confederate statue being removed, we must question the purpose of these monuments in our communities.