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And I always rejected the way the Ku Klux Klan hijacked the rebel flag, turning it into a vulgar symbol of racism, of hatred.

"LIVE" WITH TAE Shelby Foote
The American Enterprise ^ | January/February 2001 | Bill Kauffman / Shelby Foote
http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1432585/posts

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TAE: In 1970 you wrote of Klansmen who had appropriated the flag: “I tell them to their faces that they are the scum who have degraded the Confederate flag, converted it from a symbol of honor into a banner of shame, covered it with obscenities like a roadhouse men’s room wall.” Is the Confederate flag today still degraded, or have the recent assaults on it given it a new dignity?

FOOTE: It’s still mainly abused and absurdly defended. And I understand blacks’ feelings when they see the Confederate flag. The real villains are Southerners who knew what that flag truly stood for and allowed yahoos to carry it.

What happened during the period of the Northern students coming down to the South during the civil rights struggle was that to people down in Mississippi they were a pretty scruffy-looking group, and we thought, “They’re sending their trash down here to make trouble for us. Let our trash take care of it.” And our trash did, in a terrible way, like the murder of those three civil rights workers.

We should have stood up and said that those people ought not be allowed within 100 yards of the Confederate flag, let alone use it as a symbol for all they were doing. But we didn’t. It’s hard to take when people define you as corrupt people and scum. So you lash back.

This country has two profound sins on its soul. One is slavery—that’s a sin that we will probably never be able to cleanse ourselves of—and the other was emancipation. They told four and a half million people, “You are free, hit the road,” and made no provision for education. Just told them to go out, and of course they drifted back into sharecropping, which is a form of peonage, and it was just a disaster.

If the South had not lost the war, I’m sure that slavery wouldn’t have survived into the twentieth century, and it’s possible that it might have been brought to an end in a more gradual, less disastrous way. Many of the troubles we’ve got today with black communities are from their being released into the world without being prepared to deal with it.