You mean this flag?
Or this one?
How 'bout this one?
Posted on 02/17/2004 5:44:59 AM PST by stainlessbanner
As a child growing up in an all-black Tallahassee neighborhood, the sight of a truck rumbling up my street with a Confederate battle flag in the window made me and my friends shudder in fear.
Maybe the pickup had a reason for passing through, but the combination of the Southern cross and a gun rack always was seen as a harbinger of violence. Usually, I ran in the house.
Some 30 years later I shudder because people are still holding on to this symbol of racism. Controversy about the flag has arisen at Tarpon Springs High and Hudson High. Integration and other significant steps in racial progress have not deterred people from passing along a remarkable sign of hatred to another generation.
When people argue that the fight over the flag creates healthy dialogue, I think back to when I was given that opportunity. My boys were 5 and 7 when we went to dinner at Buddy Freddy's, on a day when a Confederate organization was meeting in the restaurant's banquet room. Ethan saw the flag in the other room and exclaimed, "Look at that cool flag."
For the rest of the dinner, I had to explain why the flag wasn't cool. Young minds, more accustomed to learning about phonics, soaked in lessons about slavery, freedom and a time when Americans killed Americans.
By meal's end, the restaurant's hostess had given the boys toys from the gift shop. I think she wanted to reward them for listening patiently as their father struggled to explain the inexplicable.
Of course, the flag represents more than just the South's struggle against the North, and some long-rooted Southerners identify with it in a way that transcends race. But, for decades, it was used by the Ku Klux Klan as a banner for segregation and persecution. And white supremacists still embrace it today.
When will I believe that this flag is about heritage and not hate? When I see people from Confederate organizations seriously confront racists who use the flag to espouse bigotry.
Those who wish to take pride in the South should find a less divisive icon. Hasn't our region evolved beyond the infighting and intolerance that the flag symbolizes? Why define the South by a dead Confederacy when we have Kitty Hawk and Bourbon Street and Memphis barbecue and Basin Street jazz and collard greens and Coca-Cola? If you want to show pride in the South, paint a plate of grits on a T-shirt and wear it to school.
Even SEC football and NASCAR, institutions once rooted in segregation, have made significant strides toward diversity. It's the progress of our present, not the failures of our past, that should be championed.
And for all the talk about fighting for liberty and American's second revolution, the Civil War was a failure. A rare and total loss of the humanity we have typically shared as a nation.
Consider the horrific Gettysburg battles that resulted in 50,000 casualties. Fields were strewn with dead soldiers, and the air held the screams of Americans whose limbs had been amputated. Maybe if the battle flag brought to mind those images, someone wouldn't have raised it over Hudson High.
Even if I could look beyond the racist overtones of the flag (and I can't), the rebel cross of stars would still represent American history's most divisive period. A different outcome could have brought dire consequences not only for this country, but for the entire world. Could the Allies have won World War II dependent on two separate nations instead of one United States?
History has proven there is strength in our unity, and now, more than ever in this post-9/11 world, any symbol that threatens that unity should be voluntarily abandoned.
It's been said that those who oppose the war in Iraq lend comfort to our enemies. Yet true comfort for the terrorists must come when they see a new generation of Americans divided over a 141-year-old symbol that should have been buried at Appomattox.
No, the Confederate flag should not be banned in schools. I would never deny a person's right to freedom of speech. But for those who feel compelled to wear it to school, I ask only one thing: Think about what you're doing.
That's all I'm saying.
- Ernest Hooper can be reached at 813 226-3406 or Hooper@sptimes.com
If I did, would you kiss them?
I am sure Mr. Hooper would be like some feedback on his article. He put his contact info all over the article. Let's show him some Southern hospitality.
Agreed, there is much to be said for the notion of disagreement with civility. I hope that anyone who e-mails the author will do so with that in mind, lest he be driven furthur into a misinformed and erroneous position.
I'd also like to retract my blanket indictment of liberals in my earlier post on this thread. Not because I agree with them about anything, but because I strive to see people as individuals, rather than as groups. Let the other side paint with the broad brush. I am more concerned with what is wrong or right, rather than who is wrong or right.
Is this revisionist?
So is the SPTimes for that matter.
Nor did I, and I was living in FL at that same time period. I think Ernie has a highly imaginative memory.
I also think his memory is highly selective. I don't remember seeing any trucks or cars flying Confederate flags in the city where I lived during that time. But I do remember very well the plumes of smoke rising from American cities where mobs of rioters were using racism as an excuse to burn buildings, loot stores, and beat to death white motorists who happened to blunder into their neighborhoods. If any kids should have been afraid of another race at that time it should have been white kids who lived in or near black urban neighborhoods. They had much more reason to fear a rioter carrying a brick than black kids had reason to fear a truck flying a piece of cloth.
How about a swap: the southrons give up their flag when the black nationalists give up all their separatist songs, symbols, laws, and rhetoric? You know the latter is not going to happen. As it stands I'd rather have the southrons on my side than all the anti-American Afrocentrists. They (southrons) may be stubborn as mules, but you can count on them in times of crisis. Could you count on the Al Sharptons, Jesse Jacksons, and others of their ilk? Obviously not.
You mean this flag?
Or this one?
How 'bout this one?
The people who hate the flag today do so becaust they have been taught to hate the flag, not because of something that someone wearing or waving the flag has done to them.
True, but those farm boys didn't drive the issue, just as the average German didn't initiate the Nazi land grab that precipitated the second world war. The point I was trying to make is that it's "revisionist" to pretend that bringing up the issue of slavery as a cause of the Civil War is somehow a form of revisionism. It's not. What's revisionist is the attempt by some to whitewash the realities of that causation by the insistence that it was "states rights" or "tariffs" that drove the southern states to secession. "States rights" gets double-duty as a code-word for slavery in the 1800s and segregation in the 1900s.
More to the point, hatred of black folks isn't why people fly the battle flag today, fringe groups with dubious motives notwithstanding.
Perhaps not; at least not in the mainstream. But I think it's incumbent upon people to put themselves in the place of others when deciding how they're going to appear in the public eye. Many black people of middle-age and older have distinct memories of a less-enlightened time in our nation's history. Those memories are highly unpleasant, and they see the flag as symbolic of those memories. Unlike the reparations issue, where the injured parties are long since deceased, these people experienced institutionalized racism, much of it done under the auspices of the same sentiments the flag represented, and worse. But the author of this article, to his credit, wasn't asking that people be restrained from flying the flag. He's simply asking that people take his perspective into mind before doing it.
So, we should simply abandon our ancestors' flag and pick something else?
Horsefeathers!
Fair point, but the issue isn't why the flag is flown today. It isn't about supporting some Fire Eater in the Mississippi Legislature from the 1860s. It's more about people's Great-Great Grandfathers, defying what was seen as external tyranny and 'foreign' incursion. Black people weren't especially well treated in the North either, and Black opinion in the South was a bit of a mixed bag. Even after many years of hindsight, surprisingly, according to the Slave Narratives, collected by the WPA during the Roosevelt Administration.
Also true is the fact that the roots of the whole thing go back to the old Federalism vs. Antifederalism argument, Enmity between the North and the South didn't begin with the issue of Slavery. As with two fueding neighbors, it isn't the final outrage that causes the fistfight.
Perhaps not; at least not in the mainstream. But I think it's incumbent upon people to put themselves in the place of others when deciding how they're going to appear in the public eye.
True enough. I try to conduct myself personally in this manner. However, since pro-Confederate heritage people by and large don't see the banner as an explicit (or implicit) expression of wishing to re-enslave black people, they see vocal objection to it as the usual reflexive carping of the Professionally Offended.
Thanks for your insight and for driving the real point home.
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