Confederate flag has always been about racism
The Civil War was always about slavery. The Confederate flag has always been about racism.
We love to tell stories about ourselves; from the the racist message of "The Birth of a Nation" to Disney’s "Song of the South," stories mis-taught us about that flag. Disney gave us happily “retired” slave Uncle Remus and cute little plantation kids singing and telling Brere Rabbit stories.
We loved "Gone with the Wind," with brave beautiful Scarlett swearing to “…never go hungry again.” Like her, we ignored the plight of her dear old (nameless) Mammy. White grade-school classes sang "Mammy’s Little Baby Loves Shortnin’ Bread," and "My Old Kentucky Home" where “children are happy and darkies are gay….”
Kids laughed along with the craziness of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and learned from them, as children do. Even today, in movies and TV shows, it’s usually the bad guys who have dark skin. “My oh my,” sang the little plantation children, “What a wonderful day!”
We allowed the stories to obfuscate the truth.
The post-war South rewrote history after Reconstruction was halted. They wanted to believe themselves, and they wanted everyone to believe, in the noble Lost Cause — the myth of benevolent plantation owners and happy slaves. They’ve nearly succeeded. But here are some actual lines from the Mississippi Declaration of Secession: ”Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world… Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. …These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun.”
The flag now defiantly proclaiming “freedom” from porches and pickups was originally a battle flag used to identify troops fighting as traitors against their own national government, in defense of the very opposite of freedom: chattel slavery.
Not important for some time following the Civil War, it primarily decorated graves. Both North and South wanted to forget, to move beyond the bitter memories of war that sundered families and killed so many. And so the Southern states, where most of our textbooks are designed and printed, promoted a fictional past. There had been terrible loss and great pain — and we did what is so very human, we dis-remembered. This collective forgetting helped us to not think about Jim Crow laws, lynching, Emmett Till, red-lining, discrimination.
The Confederate flag rose to prominence when, according to National Geographic, “…in 1956, prompted by the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling that declared segregation unconstitutional, Georgia adopted a state flag that prominently incorporated the symbol. Across the South, Citizens’ Councils and the Ku Klux Klan flew the battle flag as they intimidated Black citizens.”
It was prominent in KKK meetings, in lynchings. As the Civil Rights movement grew, as Gov. George Wallace in 1963 “stood on the schoolhouse steps,” as John Lewis nearly was killed in 1965 on Pettus Bridge, as Black Lives Matter struggles arose, the Confederate flag came to symbolize “freedom” for angry white racists as they clung to a past that never was.
This imagined past never stood for freedom. It always stood for white dominance. The murderer of nine churchgoers at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 was photographed with the Confederate flag. The Confederate flag featured prominently in the march in Charleston in 2017 when KKK and Nazi wannabes marched. We saw it when armed gunmen entered the Michigan Capitol. and we saw it on Jan. 6.
The recent resurgence of mindless, cult-like waving of racist symbols shows us a minority on the wrong side of history and afraid of facing the truth about themselves. It has always been about fear; fear that breeds violence; fear of looking honestly into the mirror and finding there a hollow man.
Sharon Kourous is a member of Stronger Together Huddle, a group engaged in supporting and promoting the common good of all. She is a retired English teacher from Monroe.
This article originally appeared on The Monroe News: Sharon Kourous: Confederate flag has always been about racism
