Posted on 07/18/2006 12:49:14 PM PDT by aomagrat
A Confederate heritage group says its free-speech rights were violated when a landowner removed a billboard promoting Southern history near the famed Darlington Raceway.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans plans to demonstrate at the State House next month and buy radio advertisements to complain about losing its billboard on U.S. 52, about two miles from the racetrack.
“This is the most chilling thing I’ve seen against freedom of speech,” spokesman Don Gordon said.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans bought the billboard this spring in response to remarks by a NASCAR executive about the rebel flag.
The billboard featured a Confederate flag and a checkered race flag. The message said, “Victory is Great, but Honor is Greater. Defend your Southern heritage.”
The billboard, taken down briefly in May, also listed the group’s phone number and name.
Officials of the S.C. Central Railroad, which owns the land where the billboard stood, said the message was “controversial” and needed to come down.
“It is not in our commercial interests to have billboards on our property displaying messages that might be controversial in the local community, whatever the substance of the messages,” a company spokeswoman said in a prepared statement.
“We made no judgment as to the content of the billboard, but we did understand it to be controversial and therefore asked that it be removed.”
An outdoor advertising company, hired by the Sons of Confederate Veterans, installed the sign just before Darlington’s annual Mother’s Day race. It was removed permanently June 16, according to a July 11 letter from the S.C. Sons of Confederate Veterans commander, Randall Burbage, to fellow members.
The Sons of Confederate Veterans says it is an international, nonprofit historical society. The group, which says it has 30,000 members nationally, has taken positions in defense of the Confederate flag in South Carolina.
‘NOT ... ANYTHING FAVORABLE’
In October, NASCAR’s chief executive, Brian France, told the CBS television show “60 Minutes” the Confederate flag was “not a flag that I look at with anything favorable. That’s for sure.”
As it branches away from its traditional Southern fan base, NASCAR has tried to shed its rebel-flag-waving image. The nation’s largest stock car racing organization has started diversity programs and tried to appeal to black and Hispanic fans. The Darlington Raceway, in business for more than 50 years, has served as a pillar of NASCAR.
“A member of the France family said some uncomplimentary things, so we put that billboard up to make a statement and to stimulate new members,” the confederate veterans’ Gordon said. “We really didn’t expect anything like this to occur.”
Attempts to reach NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter were unsuccessful. However, Hunter said last spring that NASCAR did not seek to have the sign removed.
“If we find out NASCAR is involved, you can expect airplanes towing Confederate banners over every NASCAR race anywhere in this nation — forever,” Gordon said.
Mac Josey, vice president at the Darlington Raceway, said he knew nothing about the billboard and did not ask that it be removed. He said the track does not fly Confederate flags, although some fans do.
Wesley Blackwell, chairman of the Darlington County Council, said he heard about the billboard during a social gathering at the Darlington speedway in May. Blackwell said the county did not ask that the sign be removed.
‘NOT A WORD WOULD BE SAID’
The Confederate veterans group paid Palmetto Outdoor Media more than $5,000 to put up the advertisement, Gordon said. Most of the money was refunded when the sign was removed.
However, Gordon is not satisfied.
“What if it was a sign trying to bring new members to the NAACP? We all know not a word would be said,” Gordon said.
Palmetto Outdoor Media co-owner Rodney Monroe said his company’s land-lease agreement with S.C. Central Railroad has a section that called for the removal of offensive advertisements.
“We lease the property from the company and we, obviously, crossed the line as far as what was acceptable to them ... and were asked to remove the sign,” Monroe said. “We are not in the business to cause or create controversy.”
Gordon said his group had a contract with Palmetto Outdoor for the sign to stay up through part of next year.
The First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees every American the right to free speech. However, the sign was on private property, and the property’s owner ordered it down.
Bill Rogers, director of the S.C. Press Association, said that removal violated the principle of free speech, if nothing else. The sign did not appear to be inflammatory, he said.
“I can see why they would feel their rights are violated, that if someone doesn’t like the message, they take it down,” Rogers said.
No, they don't -- you're being disingenuous. They're talking about the promotion of slave revolts and insurrection -- Haiti redux. That's a hell of a lot more serious than "abolitionists".
But at the heart of everyone of their complaints is a fear concerning their institution of slavery. So why do you insist that there were other, more important reasons for the southern rebellion?
Oh, come on. That's like saying, "absent banks, Bonnie Parker wouldn't have left West Dallas".
That's just disingenuous argumentation. The fact is, slavery was legal, and what John Brown did about it, wasn't.
More disingenuousness. Translation: "You might have a point somewhere in there, so I'm not going to talk about it."
Translation: "Heck I don't know what they're talking about either, but damned if I'll admit it." What doe they mean? "It has broken every compact into which it has entered for our security." What compacts are they talking about and how has their security been harmed. And most importantly, what does this not have to do with slavery? As the the other, "It has given indubitable evidence of its design to ruin our agriculture, to prostrate our industrial pursuits and to destroy our social system," in retrospect that must have to do with opposition to slavery as well since they talk about agriculture and social system. So I'm down to one which needs explaining, if you can.
What was Brown interested in other than an end to slavery?
That's just disingenuous argumentation. The fact is, slavery was legal, and what John Brown did about it, wasn't.
No arguement there. Slavery was legal and Brown's actions weren't. But I believe that the original topic was about all the clauses in the Mississippi Declaration of the Causes of Secession which didn't concern fears about the fate of slavery. I'm still not finding any.
Oh, yeah. Land of the Two Dick Daleys, that Adlai Stevenson made safe for bow ties. State that prosecuted the landmark gun-grabbing case, Presser vs. Illinois, and just sent another governor to prison. Yeah, I know about Illinois, home of Roseanne Barr's fictive TV "family".
And who hasn't heard about colorful Chicagoland, made famous by Al Capone and Frank Nitti? Where wiretaps got their start and Presser vs. Illinois somehow didn't keep the Mob from making Thompson submachineguns so famous that the British once called a multibarreled automatic flak cannon a "Chicago piano" in the toddlin' town's honor?
I currently live in Kansas. Find a more Republican state than that.
Texas. Not one Democrat in statewide office, and hasn't been for years.
Of course, you hate Texas until you turn purple, so let's talk about Indiana instead, home of President Benjamin Harrison and Vice President Dan Quayle.
That's the best you can do? Fictional TV families? I guess we all can't have "Dallas", can we? Christ, you were doing better when you were calling us Marxists.
Texas. Not one Democrat in statewide office, and hasn't been for years.
Texas, huh? In 2004 Bush took a larger percentage of the presidential vote in Kansas than he took in Texas. In 2004 a larger percentage of voters pulled the lever for Gore than Kansans. Guess it's because you all know Bush better than us, huh?
Of course, you hate Texas until you turn purple, so let's talk about Indiana instead, home of President Benjamin Harrison and Vice President Dan Quayle.
You want a native of Illinois to talk about Hoosierville?
They're talking about breaking the peace -- a reference to the John Brown raid, and also to Congress's refusal to appropriate moneys for the defense of the frontier in the slave states. Likewise, the Northern States were also very unwilling to go to war with Mexico over the southwestern frontier, and gave every indication that they would have preferred a truncated United States to one that added territory adjacent to the slave States -- a situation not often discussed in modern U.S. history courses! So the Mississippians may have been referring to the southern frontiers as well as the western one.
Was not the topic of this column, issues concerning a billboard?
They're talking about the political flattening of the Southern States, period. Slavery was only part of that -- as witness the reference to "industrial pursuits" (how does that refer to the plantation system?).
You are engaging in excessive reduction of the Northern beef with the South to a single issue. The Northern pols like Lincoln did that in their bid to unify the North politically and turn it into a bulldozer -- but the objective was the bulldozing of the South as a whole, not just slavery.
Hey, guys. Non-Sequitur says we've all been "refuted". How about that?
"It was all about slavery," again.
That would be the same Congress that had 23 southern House speakers from the south compared with 12 from the North? The same Congress that had 24 Senate President Pro-tems from the south vs. 11 from the North. The same region who had held the presidency for 60 out of 84 years? If the slave states weren't defended to their satisfaction then who do they have to blame but themselves?
Because there were. Political and social annihilation, forget the economic issues. Getting pushed into a corner and raped five times a day for the rest of time, how about that? What political leader is going to let his State, his people, get put in that position?
I understand that a system that flattened the rest of the country to the benefit of the south would have been preferable. Slavery already guaranteed the southern states a disproportionately high representation in Congress. They just didn't want to see free states with free senators and free congressmen getting in.
...as witness the reference to "industrial pursuits" (how does that refer to the plantation system?).
I was wondering about that myself. How did the North hinder what little interest in industrial expansion there was in the south?
You are engaging in excessive reduction of the Northern beef with the South to a single issue. The Northern pols like Lincoln did that in their bid to unify the North politically and turn it into a bulldozer -- but the objective was the bulldozing of the South as a whole, not just slavery.
One man's opinion, until you show otherwise?
Damn it's getting deep around here. What you are complaining about is the wished of the majority winning out over the minority. You would prefer the tyranny of the minority over the majority.
Misleading.
The North had a permanent lock on the House, and everyone knew it, as a result of preferential Irish and German immigration into the more temperate and healthier North.
Add more "freesoil" States, and voila. Permanent lock on the Senate, and soon -- following Lincoln's strategy of admitting undersized States like Nevada and West Virginia -- a host of new, small States full of freesoilers who'd vote to amend the Constitution to the Republicans' liking, at will, forever.
Oh, wait -- they did that, didn't they? Direct election of senators, and then the income tax, and then woman suffrage and Prohibition. Yup, that all worked out well, don't you think?
If Lincoln hadn't started and won the Civil War, we'd probably have had something like 54 instead of 48 States in "the lower 48".
Fallacy. False dilemma. You keep doing that.
Part of the original Constitution. Why do you keep complaining about that, unless your complaint is just that the South had anything to work with? Your idea of compromise looks awfully like boot on throat, and then we'll talk.
They just didn't want to see free states with free senators and free congressmen getting in.
Now you're projecting. But hey, let's talk about it. Okay, why should Southern States be sanguine about adding more votes to the Whig/Republican pile, when John Quincy Adams had fought like a tiger for years, to keep Texas out of the Union?
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