Took a drive through some of the south last week; in a vehicle with no sound system, I had plenty of opportunity to think. One thing that stood out in my travels was the general absence of the Confederate flag.
It is true that straying a few miles from the interstate highway in one direction or another does not make my study particularly comprehensive. However, with the exception of one side-of-the-road pickup truck selling the Stars and Bars on the outskirts of a tiny Tennessee town, the banner adopted by those who would dissolve the Union was all but invisible.
Took a drive through some of the south last week; in a vehicle with no sound system, I had plenty of opportunity to think. One thing that stood out in my travels was the general absence of the Confederate flag.
It is true that straying a few miles from the interstate highway in one direction or another does not make my study particularly comprehensive. However, with the exception of one side-of-the-road pickup truck selling the Stars and Bars on the outskirts of a tiny Tennessee town, the banner adopted by those who would dissolve the Union was all but invisible.
Likely this is because of the scarcity of my observations and not because the local populations have completely rejected association with their Civil War history. But it got me to thinking about that flag – actually a variation of the Battle Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia – and other symbols we as a culture display.
A while back, I spoke with some folks from a decidedly northern state about South Carolina’s decision to remove the Confederate colors from its State House. Not one of them had roots below the Mason Dixon line, but they unanimously bemoaned the controversy, suggesting this was another example of political correctness run amuck and some people were being “too sensitive” about that flag.
But, 150 years after capturing Fort Sumner, I think the Palmetto State finally made the right call.
To have a state government flying the Confederate standard was wrong. In doing so, the state tacitly endorsed the principles that led to secession. Those principles were almost solely based on the righteousness of slavery, the systematic subjugation-for-profit of one race of people by another.
Repeatedly since the Reconstruction the flag has been embraced by groups wanting to maintain a social structure of racial oppression. A century after the War Between the States, the Confederate ensign was reborn as an emblem of Southern resistance to civil rights and the eradication of state-sanctioned segregation.
Slavery was a horrific institution; people were treated as property, as less-than-human beings. As such, the practice of slavery was dreadfully cruel, but no more than the daily indignities and brutalities suffered for generations after slavery’s end by blacks all across America.
Officially flying the banner of a system that denied human dignity, let alone one that regularly degraded and killed people, is not something South Carolina could be proud of. Doing so denies the guarantees of their own Constitution, which include equal protection under the law, and no person being deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process.
This is not an issue of personal expression or personal identification with a “heritage.” Private citizens may freely express themselves using the flag of the Confederacy, the Nazi Party, North Korea, the Khmer Rouge, USSR, or any other.
But in that expression, those citizens also validate the inhumanity of the regimes to whom those symbols belong. In our time, in our society, no government in our nation should endorse anything like that.
Pat Grimes, a former South Bay resident, writes from Ypsilanti, Mich. He can be reached at pgwriter@inbox.com
