It’s a long way from Cincinnati to Columbia, S.C., so maybe the controversy over flying the Confederate battle flag over the South Carolina state capitol building is none of my damned business. But then again, since the Ku Klux Klan once again reared its ugly hood in the heart of my hometown last month, maybe it is.
The (white) government of South Carolina first hoisted the flag over its state capitol in 1962 — sort of a Jolly Roger in the face of federally enforced integration. It was the Good Old Boys’ way of saying “screw you” to the northern liberals who were forcing whites to treat more than half of South Carolina’s population as equal citizens. Why, the nerve of those Kennedys!
And, because of some odd aversion to being lynched in the middle of the night, most of South Carolina’s black citizens didn’t protest the flag’s presence back then. We can take it as a sign of progress that, in recent years, the minority population of South Carolina now feels that it can voice its opposition with reasonable safety. And they want the flag to come down.
Some white citizens counter that the flag is an emblem of South Carolina’s history, that it’s a cultural icon that has a legitimate place in society and should be displayed in public. I’m going to grant these folks the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re not a pack of tree-swinging, knuckle-dragging, unreconstructed white supremacists. Hey, we can’t all be Jesse Helms, right?
But it comes down to this. There might be some Germans who view the iron cross as a cultural icon, too, but Hitler and his jack-booted minions stole it from them. For the rest of the world, it will forever be a symbol of hatred and mass murder. The swastika now represents the depths of human depravity and evil, and no amount of spin doctoring can ever change that. Want a cultural icon? Try knockwurst.
Likewise, gallant men served under the Confederate battle flag, citizen soldiers who fought bravely and died in their flag’s defense. But the Ku Klux Klan and its lesser spawn have stolen the Confederate flag and made it their own — the symbol of their hatred and oppression. It’s ironic that Klansmen wear white hoods to preserve anonymity, which effectively turns the flag into a symbol for cowardice as well. Decent white southerners can thank the KKK for desecrating their cultural heritage.
But then there are also those unrepentant racists — both North and South — who now appear to be a key Republican constituency. George W. Bush and John McCain have twisted themselves in knots to avoid alienating the white voters who still revere the flag. Who are these voters? Remember all those southern Democrats who bolted the party in recent years to join the Republicans? Same folks.
So in its ongoing attempts to become more diverse, the Republican Party is reaching out to include corporate millionaires and white-trash trailer park fuhrers. The Rainbow Coalition, it ain’t.
Conservative apologists point out that some slaves actually fought in defense of the Confederacy, so the flag is really part of their cultural heritage, too. Their argument suggests that black men found life in slavery so appealing that they were willing to fight to maintain their status as beasts of burden. It suggests that they were so enamored of state’s rights that the rape of their mothers, wives and daughters was just a minor annoyance.
See what happens when cousins marry?
It’s like arguing that because some Jews worked as slave laborers in Nazi factories, they should be goose-stepping right alongside David Dukes or Pat Buchanan. Just to set the record straight, fewer than one-half of 1 percent of slaves ever took up arms “defending” the Confederacy, and most did it on the condition that — if the South won independence — they would be granted their freedom.
It’s time to bring the flag down.
Put it in a museum. Use it to teach children that people can be honorable even when their cause is not. Teach them also that once there was a world where human beings were bought and sold like cabbages, but that world no longer exists. Because there were black people who refused to be degraded even in slavery and because there were white people who understood our common human birthright, we live in a different America than the one our founding fathers created.
But we live in an America that is still vastly unequal, where black men are routinely stopped and questioned by the authorities simply because they’re black men, and where minorities are still the last hired and the first fired. We live in an America where a third of all young black men are either in jail or on parole or probation, but less than 5 percent are in college.
Bringing down the Confederate flag will not change the reality of life in America for minorities. But it’s a good place to start.
JEFF RITCHIE is a Cincinnati free-lance writer.
This article appears in Feb 23-29, 2000.