My Take on Confederate Symbols
by tgirsch

UPDATED to clarify a few points.

In an earlier post, Kevin refers to a new Confederate military academy, and wonders aloud as to the motivation:

I have never understood this fetishization of the Confederacy in the South ... I understand that there are people fond of those values, but why choose the Confederacy? ... Why choose the symbol of a bunch of losers?
...
In essence, these people are saying that, not only do we want to emulate people who were in favor of treason, slavery and segregation, we want to emulate people who were really, really bad at treason, slavery and segregation.

To me, Kevin misunderstands things just a bit here. The point I think he misses is that there genuinely is tremendous ignorance about what the stars and bars have historically represented.

There are two separate issues here that get easily confused: pride in being a southerner; and the checkered history of the confederate battle flag. I'll address these separately. And I'd like to disclaim up front that I was born and raised in the North, so my understanding lacks the Southern perspective.

There are things about the South that I believe are genuinely nice, and worthy of pride. It's been my experience that Southern hospitality is not a myth, but rather, a very real thing. The simpler lifestyle prevalent in much of the South is doubtless attractive to a lot of people, even if not to me personally. Down home cooking, and all that. Mild winters. The beautiful Appalachian landscape. Politeness ("Yes, sir." "No, Ma'am."). In short, there are plenty of positive and uniquely Southern things to be proud of.

The problem is, that historically speaking, the Confederate battle flag has stood for none of these things. As Kevin points out, it originally stood for a group whose primary goal was to leave the Union to preserve slavery. Apologists may try to claim otherwise, but the history is clear. Slavery was the most contentious issue in the country in the decades leading up to the war, and careful balance was maintained in the Senate so that neither slave state nor free state ever gained an advantage, and yet we're supposed to believe that this was a secondary concern in the civil war? I'm sorry, but that just doesn't hold water.

And even if that weren't the case, the flag has been irreparably poisoned by its later use by White Supremacist groups and by people opposed to civil rights legislation. The symbols of the Confederacy, specifically the stars and bars, were virtually dead and buried following the civil war. These symbols weren't revitalized until the "States' Rights" movement of the 1950's. Unfortunately, in this case, "States' Rights" meant the right of states to disregard newly-passed federal civil rights legislation. The flag was used as part of a southern backlash at the idea of having to treat "the nigras" as equal human beings.

Don't believe me on this count? On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court's unanimous ruling in Brown v. Board of Education effectively ended segregation. The State of Georgia responded in 1956 by adding the stars and bars to the state flag, where red and white stripes used to be. The stars and bars were moved to a less prominent location in 2001, and finally removed in 2003, but not without considerable controversy.

South Carolina started flying the flag over the statehouse in 1962, by vote of the then all-white legislature. It wasn't removed from there until 2000, but even then it was only moved to a prominent display on the Capitol lawn.

In 1963, as Alabama Gov. George Wallace was fighting the federal government over civil rights issues, he began flying the confederate battle flag over the Alabama statehouse. It was lowered during a renovation in 1992, and would have been re-raised if that hadn't been blocked by a lawsuit.

The sole exception here seems to be Mississippi, which adopted its current flag in 1894, with the Confederate battle flag in the upper-left.

Clearly, the confederate flag has a contentious history at best. This history is immutable. So while there are plenty of legitimate reasons to be proud to be a Southerner, and be proud of the South, I fail to see why the Confederate flag is consistently chosen as the symbol of this pride. Why not select a symbol that doesn't carry all of this negative baggage? It's possible to be a proud German without brandishing Nazi imagery at every turn. Why isn't it acceptable to be a proud Southerner while condemning Confederate imagery?

If the Confederate flag does not stand for bigotry, as its checkered history seems to suggest, then I fail to see exactly what it does stand for. To a Northerner like me, if it doesn't stand for bigotry, it seems to stand for a group of people who don't want to be part of the US. Isn't that what being a "Rebel" means? What else is there? Bo and Luke Duke? If the Confederate Flag is not an inherently divisive and racist symbol, then why do White Supremacist groups continue to embrace it?

In summation, I see no reason why Southerners shouldn't be proud to be Southern. Slavery and bigotry are nothing to be proud of, but I'd like to think that those things aren't what the South is all about (indeed, the South has no monopoly on either). But this obsession with the Confederate flag can only serve to remind us of that abhorrent past, and makes it impossible for us as a nation to move forward. I think Southerners need to be honest about what the battle flag has historically represented. and how it has historically been used, and if they don't know, find out. Then we can get on with life.

ADDENDUM: Harry Tuttle points out that I've misused the terms "stars and bars" and "confederate battle flag," and it turns out he's correct. The "confederate flag" most of us are used to seeing is actually the Confederate Navy Jack, although sometimes we also do see the battle flag. The stars and bars is almost never seen. Images of the various flags used by the confederacy can be found here.

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