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. 

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 Gibbs Knotts & Chris Cooper

A longstanding social science finding holds that collective public opinion is fairly sticky on most issues. In other words, the public’s views do not change very much — and when opinions do shift, the movement tends to be fairly slow. Public opinion does not change over the course of a day, week or month, but rather occurs over years or decades, if it moves at all.

 The recent debate over the Confederate flag might seem to challenge this narrative. A little more than two weeks ago, North Carolina Gov. Pat McCrory’s press secretary, Josh Ellis, said that the governor supported a ban on specialty license plates featuring the Confederate battle flag. According to Ellis, this change was “due to the recent Supreme Court ruling and the tragedy in Charleston.”

Jackson County is no longer a banner-less government. County commissioners selected an official county flag this week from a pool of a dozen designs submitted by high school, community college and university students. The chosen design is by Southwestern Community College graphic design student Jessica Waldron.

Even though there’s little room for compromise, I’m going to step into the fray.

Haywood County commissioners are trying to come up with a policy about Confederate flags and whether they should be allowed at the Confederate memorial that adorns the courthouse lawn. The flags — tiny, hand-held ones at that — were offensive to at least one person who raised the issue to the county, but I suspect there are many others who find the symbol just as offensive but are keeping their mouths shut.

When it comes to Southerners, there are a few topics that get their blood pressure elevated — and one of those topics is flags.

They represent everything from historical ties, bloodshed, peace, pride and Nascar. They’re flown everywhere from government buildings to front porches to Wal-Mart.