Posted on 06/12/2002 7:48:50 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
CRESTVIEW -- The NAACP wants the Confederate battle flag removed from a memorial on city property that honors Florida's last Civil War veteran, who died in 1957.
Sabu Williams, local chapter president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, on Monday likened the flag to the Berlin Wall, contending it represents a wall of terror, hatred, murder, bigotry and shame.
"The heritage of the Confederate battle flag is that it was meant to divide," Williams told the City Council. "Today, we should be looking at things that bind us, not divide us."
The council delayed a decision until June 24 after listening to Williams and some of about 70 other residents who packed its chambers. Each side was given 10 minutes.
Martin Barker, representing the Florida Division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, said the flag is a sign of history, not hate. "History is a fact," Barker said. "We can't change it, but we can learn from it. If we bury it, we will deprive our children and our grandchildren of that fact."
The memorial was put up along State Road 85, one of Crestview's main thoroughfares, a year after William "Uncle Bill" Lundy died in this Panhandle city. An earlier effort to remove the flag failed in 1996.
Williams said he had no issue with the memorial, just the flag.
One of Lundy's grandsons, Hayden Lundy, argued to keep the flag, saying his grandfather never hated anyone. "Uncle Bill Lundy was a loving man," he said.
The NAACP has organized protests and economic boycotts in other places where it has fought to bring down the Confederate battle flag.
"We will do what we have to do," Williams said. "We will not stop until we have succeeded in removing that flag."
In addition to my Revolutionary War flags, which I'll be displaying soon (I hang them all out in the days leading up to the Fourth, and fly Betsy Ross on the Fourth), I have a number of Confederate flags and am looking for more -- most wanted right now is a copy of General Polk's corps flag. He was an Episcopal bishop, and so he took his battle flag and redesigned it as a red Cross of St. George -- bearing stars as before -- and uprighted it on a field of blue. He added white fimbrations to the cross as per heraldic convention, but some of his Tennessee troops dispensed with them when making their regimental colors and sewed the red cross directly to the blue. I've seen illustrations of a couple of these Tennessee regimentals somewhere, one of them with the fimbration, one without.
The Confederate monuments are all gone in New Orleans; I read in the New Orleans paper that they are under lock and key in a secret location by order of the former mayor, Marc Morial (or maybe his daddy, Ernest Morial). No telling how long Bobby Lee's likeness will remain -- they'll pull it down eventually, but I think the state legislature's prospective, and consequential, displeasure is a restraining influence. Elsewhere in the South, as in Alabama, black politicians are making an issue of Confederate monuments and refusing to allow bills for their maintenance to pass, howbeit they are on public property.
Wait 'til somebody comes for their symbols - their number will be up one day. Then they will realize, they should have stood with us and preserved the memory of our ancestors - all of them....honored.
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