I've seen similar displays in other regions. What's wrong with coastal Mississippi displaying a gallery of historical flags?
Posted on 07/14/2002 7:11:51 AM PDT by stainlessbanner
GULFPORT, Miss. (AP) -- Using metal barricades, police separated protesters, including NAACP members and a David Duke-founded group, that clashed over a newly resurrected Confederate flag display on Saturday.
Eugene Bryant, the Mississippi president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, told about 40 anti-flag protesters the debate should move to the negotiating table.
"We would rather negotiate than demonstrate," he said.
Harrison County supervisors on Tuesday returned the Confederate flag to an eight-flag beachfront display representing the governments that have ruled here since 1699.
Supervisors took the flag down two years ago amid protests and flag thefts, but officials voted in May to put it back up.
On Saturday, flag supporters and opponents dueled on the beach with signs, flag displays and words.
Bryant said Coast NAACP chapters will arrange meetings with business and religious leaders to urge supervisors to remove the Confederate flag.
About five members of the European-American Unity and Rights Organization joined some 20 pro-flag demonstrators. EURO is affiliated with former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.
Vincent Breeding of New Orleans, EURO's national director, said anti-flag protesters were trying to "intimidate" county officials into taking the flag down.
Bryant used fiery rhetoric to denounce flag supporters.
"At a time when this nation should be united, some members of the Harrison County Board of Supervisors seem to be united in pushing the agenda of the Ku Klux Klan -- hate, racism and division," Bryant said.
David Marney of New Orleans said a friend from Bay St. Louis has been sending him newspaper clippings about the flag controversy.
"It's a ridiculous thing to be fighting over," Marney said. "This is helping Mississippi and the Coast keep a really bad image."
for dixie,sw
being northern-born no more makes one a damnyankee than it makes you a Baptist.some of the finest folks in the land are Copperheads!
for dixie,sw
free dixie NOW,sw
In any case, they have their own flag, which not many people know about, which I've seen a couple of times at gun shows. It's like the Canadian flag, with two vertical red bars and a white one in the middle, with a Maltese cross (I think it's Maltese) as a device in the middle. The cross has the symbol of a drop of blood mounted at its crux -- symbolic of the One Drop Rule.
I've heard Southerners mistake the Third National for a Klan flag, so people know they have one, and it isn't the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia (/Army of Tennessee).
Last point: when the famous photo of the 1920's Klan march in Washington was taken, the Klansmen were all marching under a United States flag. Likewise, when a famous journalist attended a Silver Shirts convention just before the War, he commented afterward that "more American flags than Americans" in attendance. Which was intended as a shot at the attendees -- but they flew lots of American flags.
And just which hate-mongers would those be, friend?
Thank you for supporting the original point, which was that the Confederate flag was co-opted for their own purposes by the Klan a lot later on......that their most significant activity was undertaken under the U.S. flag instead.
And which significant activity was that?
And FWIW, the Confederacy was just the Klan without the masks.
Stop lying, please.
The Civil War was not about racism.
The Confederacy was in fact not coterminous with the KKK in any of its incarnations. Some ex-Confederates like James Longstreet endorsed conciliatory views, refuting utterly your lame attempt at a one-line zinger.
Stop it. You're embarrassing me.
They were just making the valid point against you, who insisted that the Confederate flag was a Klan symbol. And of course, the U.S. flag isn't a Klan symbol, either. Neither one is. The Klan has very specific emblems and a heraldry all their own.
The big marches in D.C., their participation in the 1924 Democratic convention, lynchings down South, the apogee of Jim Crow.......and threatening my grandfather with death (a threat made good against another man at the same time) if he didn't sell his small-town Indiana Ford agency. That was also in the 1920's, the summer of their fortunes.
I've seen similar displays in other regions. What's wrong with coastal Mississippi displaying a gallery of historical flags?
"Those people" never do admit that, do they?
Absolutely. Thanks for the clarification.
Climb down off your high horse and admit that Forrest actually had little to do with the direction of the Klan at any point. He didn't found it, got sucked into joining because he provided a name, and when he resigned and requested that the Klan disband they ignored him. It was all an exaggeration, like so much about the 'lost cause'.
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