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.