Posted on 04/13/2002 10:36:17 PM PDT by JohnnyReb1983
RALEIGH, N.C. (2001-01-25) Vicky Poston is a Reb with a cause.
When Alcoa Inc. banned Confederate symbols from workers' cars at its North Carolina plant last year, Ms. Poston did something rare for a propriety-conscious Southerner: She took to the streets in protest.
As big rigs honked in support and a protester waved the battle flag from a Ford Mustang convertible, Poston and 150 activists pushed the big aluminum firm to scale back its ban on Confederate license plates, bumper stickers, and other regalia.
After years of enduring similar prohibitions on things Confederate, emboldened Southerners are increasingly donning their Dixie duds and unfurling traditional state flags in defense of embattled Southern heroes and symbols.
From the palm-fronded streets of Charleston, S.C., to the historic storefronts of Selma, Ala., the movement reflects a reawakening of traditional Southern pride and a strong sense of regionalism.
Indeed, the growing backlash against efforts to take down the flag - including the recent legislative battles in South Carolina, Georgia, and Mississippi - may signal a deeper shift in Southern culture. The rise of a new political class of Confederate sympathizers indicates that many are ready to reawaken Confederate ideals such as states' rights and sovereignty.
To be sure, Southern partisanship evokes images of Jim Crow and slavery to much of the country. And ominous motives may well lie behind some of the activists. Yet experts say many of those embracing the new movement are driven more by regional pride, resistance to the Federal government, and a desire to reconnect with a lost heritage. They'd like to recast the South as the last bastion of civility, independence, and constitutional ideals.
Critics, though, see darker tones in the surge in Southern pride - and a collision with the values of the New South.
"These guys are very much building the intellectual capital which they hope to make the foundation for a ... reborn Confederacy," says Mark Potok, editor of the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Report in Montgomery, Ala. And the size scares him. "You have 9,000 and 15,000-person membership rolls, huge groups littered with PhDs, doctors, and lawyers, which are vastly more politically dangerous than any Klan or neo-Nazi group could ever be."
Southern partisans are certainly rallying the troops:
*Last Saturday, more than 2,000 people showed up in Atlanta to celebrate the birthday of Confederate General Robert E. Lee - most years, the celebration draws about 300 people.
*Southerners are increasingly putting up new Confederate monuments along the South's tobacco roads. A statue of a controversial Civil War general went up near a black neighborhood in Selma, Ala., late last year.
*This weekend, League of the South will open its North Carolina State University chapter in Raleigh - one in a string of recent gambits to bring Southern youths back to Confederate ideals. The director says the league's South Carolina chapter saw a 300 percent increase in membership last year.
*After a five-year planning period, the Southern Party was formed last year in Asheville, N.C. It advocates regional independence and the end of the South's role as "the nation's whipping boy."
In perhaps the greatest show of Confederate unity yet, thousands of battle flags went up on memorials and front lawns across South Carolina the day they removed the flag from the statehouse last June. "It was like Christmas in Cuba," says Mike Tuggle, the leader of a Southern independence group in Charlotte, N.C.
Some say the pro-Southern activities are in part a reaction to anti-Southern efforts. "People are having to stand up for what they believe in," says Chris Sullivan, editor of the conservative Southern Partisan magazine in Columbia, S.C.
Despite an explosion in their numbers, these new Confederate sympathizers, like their forefathers, are still outnumbered.
Southern partisans are losing the big battles. A travel boycott by the 500,000-strong NAACP finally pushed the South Carolina legislature to move the Southern cross state flag from the top of the State House to a nearby soldier's memorial. On Wednesday, facing a similar boycott threat, Georgia's House of Representatives voted to redesign the state flag to minimize the Southern cross.
And in what promises to be a bellwether gauge of the feelings of the New South, Mississippi residents will go to the polls for an April referendum to decide what to do about the Confederate insignia on their state flag.
While many Southerners claim the St. Andrew's cross is a proud symbol of a heritage and principles their forefathers fought to save, others call it an "ugly memory." They recall the 1950s, when many state capitols unfurled it as a show of Southern defiance against federal desegregation measures.
And the idea that the country has decided to erase all things Southern is unfounded, says Potok. "The war occurred, and there's no point in pretending it didn't. Besides, removing all signs of the Civil War is a little akin to the Soviets airbrushing assassinated leaders out of photographs."
In the end, the reawakening of Confederate ideals is about much more than tugging on an old flag. Deeper historical, religious, and political forces are at work, says Walter Williams, chairman of the economics department at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. "A lot of this might be the resurrection of some ... issues that led up to the War Between the States in 1861," he says. "Specifically, the heavyhandedness of the federal government. And that's why you're seeing a lot of renewed interest in the 10th Amendment and states' rights."
At least in the South, the old Confederate ideas have found fresh root in the red Dixie clay. "I think it comes down to the simple fact that [people] are alienated in modern life," says Mr. Tuggle. "There are a lot of changes going on.... The Confederate heritage gives you something very important to hold onto."
And the Union fought for the "status quo."
The South responded because the DNA of the Founding Fathers flowed through their (our) veins.
Yeah, still defending the right. :)
Walt
Delaware was a slave state.
Walt
Only temporarilly.
It was on a Confederarte thread not to long ago and I did not have a dog in that fight. As I recall, he posted something about Confederates and "traitors" and then, right in the middle of the thread, he was banned. The Southerners gloated. The FR Powers That Be later had mercy and he is now back on FR.
I have been to the South, primarily in the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, and Tennessee. Perhaps that isn't Deep South, so go ahead and tell me how harmonious it is there. Of course, that will contradict what I have heard from relatives and co-workers, both white and black have told me about Mississippi and Alabama. Blatant racism certainly is not absolute anywhere, but in the South, it is more than tolerated.
So you like movies? Remember "Pennsylvania Burning"? Oh, I'm sorry, that's "Mississippi Burning". You'll probably tell me it was written because it was the exception, not the rule.
I didn't know that the Underground Railroad extended to Canada, thanks for at least something informative. It does make sense though, perhaps the former slaves fleeing the South were afraid that the Confederates would win the war, best to leave the country. By the way, how come the Railroad only took blacks north, and never south?
Would you care to remember the atmosphere in the South during the 60's? Blacks were being lynched, tarred and feathered and hung for literally no reason other than being black. I can imagine their lack of enthusiasm for recruiting supporters while living in the belly of the beast. Southern cops used any excuse to beat and kill blacks, civil disobediance included. Don't pretend you aren't aware of this.
Why did MLK march on Montgomery? Why was it considered courageous to do so? Where was he killed? Who was surrised, anyone?
How many state's rights issues invoke the actual image of the symbol of the last Western bastion of slavery? None.
Do the Right a favor: Either stay off our side, or at least keep your mouth shut.
That's what I have always concluded as a Northerner. Southern Pride doesn't offend me. Repressing or distorting the memory of great Americans like Robert E. Lee does.
Perhaps you mean Birth of a Nation, which came out in 1915.
I guess that South America isn't part of the Western world, huh? Brazil had slavery until 1880 or thereabouts. You're just very uninformed and misinformed and you have the arrogance that comes with being a TV addict.
Don't worry about my "staying off the right's side". You people who refer to yourselves as "the right" are socialists. I'm a conservative, not a republican. Of course, if you would like to give me some entertainment, you could always try to make me shut up......
P.S. I'm one of those rough looking old boys you see so many of down here, with a deep South accent that is instantly recognizable to other Southerners and my wife and daughter are black. I would be much quicker to whip David Duke's ass if he ran his mouth around my family than you would. You would go home and write him a mean letter, I bet. ahaha....The thought of someone making me shut up without getting in my face to do it is comical.
"I have done that," says my memory. "I cannot have done that" -- says my pride, and remains adamant. At last -- memory yields. --Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
One comes to think of one's ancestors as "just like us" only better and to attribute all faults to those who opposed them. History is more complicated than that, though. Good and evil are mixed together more thoroughly. I suspect most Southerners recognize that. But some compensate for the impurity of history by making some opponent purely evil.
It's especially unfortunate that the need for regional pride combines with the desire to explain where things went wrong in history to produce resiliant myths about the Old South and the Civil War. The Rebel troops were indeed brave and were fighting for their homes and families and what they took to be freedom.
But the Confederate leadership was very much not "just like us." And they had been after far more than just "to be let alone." The government they were fighting against was not repressive in 1860 and gave them no cause for justified rebellion. They were not fighting the same battles Americans are fighting now. Southern elites were as militarist, imperialist, centralist, represssive and statist as other elites. And if they Old Republic died, they were the ones who dealt the blow that killed it.
If you are a Southerner, especially a White Southerner, you might nevertheless feel that they were fighting for your freedom. But nothing I've seen, heard or read convinces me that they were fighting for my freedom, or for that of most contemporary Americans or that those who fought against them were fighting for tyranny.
It's too bad that so much Southern pride is vested in that war. It's also a pity that so much effort is put into justifying not just the bravery or dedication of the troops but the secessionist cause, and not just justifying it, but maintaining that it was purer and more politically correct by modern standards than any 19th century political movement could be. It might produce a more accurate and nuanced view if some of the cynicism expressed here about American political history were applied to that of the Confederacy as well.
Is Southern pride simply American pride? Sometimes it really doesn't look like it here. It really does look like militant Southern pride intends to heap as much abuse on non-Southern elements in order to keep itself alive. But the saving grace in all this is that most Americans are learning that virtues and vices aren't confined to this or that section or segment of society, but are more evenly distributed throughout our country.
You tried to skew perception of these events by suggesting that Delaware was somehow excluded from writing Jim Crow laws because it was a northern state when it was in fact a slave state.
You were dishonest. You got caught.
Walt
You comunists are a joke, son. Nobody is buying your washed up, murderous old ideology anymore unless you present it as something else.
Nonsense. Delaware is a northern state, no matter how you spin it. Delaware was a slave state which remained in the union. It was not a Confederate state and never even threatened secession . Delaware being the first state to pass Jim Crow laws is extremely inconvenient for your side which wants to paint Jim Crow as a strictly Southern phenomenon. It was a national system and as bad in the north as anywhere else. Where did I "suggest that Delaware was somehow excluded from writing Jim Crow laws"? I said that Delaware was the first to write them, which is hardly suggesting that they were excluded from writing them. You're too inarticulate to argue, and that's why you rely almost totally on cut&paste. Better stick to the purloined words of other communists, lest you reveal yourself as a dimwit.
Here's another little factoid for you about Delaware: the last of the race riots of the civil rights era happened in Wilmington, Delaware in 1972. That place is still an armpit of racial hatred and separatist politics. Anyone familiar with Wilmington can tell you so, if they're honest.
It's extremely annoying trying to communicate with someone too dull witted to even know how to keep up his end of an argument and too dishonest to ever admit that he's wrong about anything. You're a liar, son. You're also not up to an argument about anything not archived on the university websites you use for cut&paste "evidence". Those AOL eggheads you're so impressed with should give you more access. All the communists in academia are archiving crap online with free labor from their grad students for the purpose of advancing their ideology on discussion sites. You could find BS to back up anything you wanted to say if your egghead pals weren't so elitist about granting access.
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