This post first appeared at Slavery By Another Name blog.
When
I was a Boy Scout in Leland, Mississippi, my patrol in Troop 42 called
itself “the Rebels” during 1976. I still have locked in a trunk
somewhere little wooden blocks I painted with the names of each scout
imposed over a crude image of the Confederate battle flag – a wall
decoration of some sort for the scout hall. I was fascinated by the
Confederacy, the Civil War, the rebel monuments on every courthouse
lawn, the headstone of my ancestor Morris Foshee, with its inscription
of his unit, the 47th Alabama infantry.
For a southern boy raised
in the wet hothouse of what I call neo-Confederate, nostalgic
triumphalism, it is astonishing to see the swift political moves in
South Carolina to lower the Confederate battle emblem in the wake of the
massacre at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. All the more
so, when compared to the decades of intransigence about Confederate
symbols in the South and among a certain lethargic group of white
Americans everywhere. How could this change happen in the blink of eye –
if it does – when there was such fierce resistance and seeming fealty
in the recent past to that striking blue cross and 13 stars on a red
field?
Author Douglas Blackmon on 20th Century Neo-Slavery
It
is a mistake however, to interpret the resilience of the Confederate
battle flag as “popularity” among large numbers of people, or as
something that triggers outpourings of
affection or other
positive emotions. It is wrong even to suggest that support for public
display of the flag is even closely related – as it was for me in
childhood – to some
fond remembrance of the past, or even a
sentimental connection to soldiers of long ago who sacrificed for a
cause they believed in. No, only the tiniest numbers of southerners with
an attachment to the emblem of the Confederate revolt have even a vague
awareness of their familial connections to the Civil War, or even
faintly what life looked like in the sweaty, un-airconditioned,
drawling, poverty stricken, overalls bedecked, brutish farm boy
landscape of the pre-1960s South. Only the most dedicated sad-sack
members of the Sons of the Confederacy or unshaven faux intellectuals at
loony fringe groups like the “League of the South,” or naive little
boys in the 1970s, can even tell you that the “Rebel flag” began as a
symbol of Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia and gradually came
to identify in the eyes of all Americans the entire white southern
uprising to defend slavery. Even fewer white southerners can tell their
own family histories – like that of my great-great-grandfather Foshee,
and his years as an obscure private under that banner in the 47th
Alabama.No, the seeming immovability of that symbol over the
past half century has been about something very different from an
appreciation of actual history. The modern resurrection and defense of
the flag was wholly a product of the civil rights struggles since the
1950s, and the need for a rallying point for defenders of segregation
and apologists for white discrimination and white privilege. The flag
wasn’t even flying in most southern states until the 1960s, and then it
was hoisted with the explicit intention of telling the rest of the
country, finally emerging from its own racial dark ages, to go to hell.
And wherever that flag was invoked, it was accompanied in those days by
explicit defenses of the most virulent racism and ethnic hate.
There
was no sugar coating what it meant. The legislators and state officials
who brought the battle flag out of the closet in the 1960s were the
exact same people who openly praised the murders of civil rights
workers, openly called Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. a communist ape,
openly predicted the “mongrelization” of the white race if segregation
ended, publicly said science proved the mental inferiority of
African-Americans. The flag was as open a symbol of violent oppression
of black people and resistance to democracy, as the German swastika was
the symbol of fascism and a desperate desire to murder the Jews of
Europe. Mississippi Gov. Ross Barnett, who said ending segregation would
be to “drink from the cup of genocide,” knitted together all the
imagery, meanings and vile intentions in September 1962, in a 15-word
speech at an Ole Miss football game. Standing in a Nuremberg-esque sea
of Confederate battle banners, Barnett declared: “I love Mississippi. I
love her people, our customs. I love and respect our heritage.” The next
day, thousands of white men attacked federal marshals protecting the
first black student to enroll at the university. It took 30,000 federal
troops to restore calm.
The private letters among carriers of the
Confederate battle flag back then are most remarkable in one way: those
men actually believed the heinous things they were saying in public. And
they acted under a misguided belief that most of the rest of white
America, actually
shared those views deep down. They honestly
believed the Civil Rights Movement was an aberration – a course
deviation caused by one spectacularly gifted black orator, his
weak-bellied liberal supporters, and, it surely must be, his secret
controllers in the Soviet Union. They truly believed all that for a good
reason: just 15 or 20 years earlier, they would have been right. In the
1940s, white Americans in every part of the country – including
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, most members of his cabinet and the majority
of the Supreme Court – agreed that almost all black people were
naturally inferior to white people. When southern politicians
resurrected Confederate emblems in the 1960s, it was part of a genuine,
if gigantically mistaken, belief that white Americans everywhere could
be led or inspired back to their own past racist instincts.
Fortunately, that effort failed. Spectacularly.
The refusal to take the flag
back down
over the 50 years since then has been simply this: an effort to falsely
obscure the explicitly racist nature of those leaders – and white
southerners and lots of other white Americans generally – in that
two-decade long extended moment of national decision when white
southern men, women, teachers, preachers, politicians, police, judges,
doctors, lawyers, mechanics and every other stripe overwhelmingly
failed. Faced with the greatest question of social conscious they would
ever confront, they failed as Americans. They failed as Christians. They
failed as believers in freedom. They failed as parents and
grandparents. And for the next two generations or more, it became
important among white southerners to conceal or excuse that abject
failure.
As it became apparent that the nation collectively
rejected the immoral, backward views of the white South, it became
necessary to “window dress” what had happened. The argument hadn’t been
about white supremacy, they began to claim, it was about the government
getting too big. The objection wasn’t about having black and white kids
in school together, it was about violence on campus, they said. They
hadn’t meant to suggest that all black boys are inclined to rape, only
that teen pregnancy and “welfare queens” are not good. They hadn’t meant
to suggest that the people whose labor they had exploited for 300 years
were in fact lazy and incompetent. And yes, as Gov. Barnett told you in
1962, the Confederate battle flag wasn’t about suppressing black
people, or defending slavery, or endorsing the violence of the Klan. It
was about bravery, honor, appreciation of genteel women, limited
government and constitutional principles.
It was about “heritage not hate.”
The
reason the tide may be turning against this long misuse of the
Confederate flag is because, thankfully, enough time and generations
have passed that the number of Americans who know anything about the
flag or have any legitimate interest in it is getting smaller and
smaller. The architects of the flag propaganda of another time have,
presumably in the wisdom of god, been taken from the earth, and those of
us who remain didn’t listen well. It’s not just young African-Americans
who don’t know as much as they should about the abuses suffered by
their forebears; hardly any young Americans are interested in all that
unpleasant past – especially now that so many of them are dating or
coveting members of the other race, listening to Hip Hop and seeing a
black man in the White House. One way or another, it has been absorbed
that black people achieving some semblance of equality did not in fact
cause the earth to consume itself in fire.
So the only people
today who exhibit the Confederate flag – other than state governments,
ironically, and a few holdout private schools – are in fact white
supremacists, loutish rednecks, a has-been country music singer or two,
neo-Nazis, and pathetically undereducated fools. Oh, and yes, people who
make meth in broken down trailer houses.
That wasn’t the case as
recently as the debate in Georgia 20 years ago that led to the removal
of the battle emblem from that state flag, or the statewide vote on
changing the flag in Mississippi at about the same time. (It failed –
with even African-American voters supporting the flag in a twisted
expression of home state “loyalty.”) Even as late as those events in the
1990s, there were still a lot of aging white southern males around who
had grown up feeling, even after the dust had settled, that the civil
rights movement had been at a minimum “unfair” to whites and wrongly
impugned them and their fathers before them.
Even if polite about
race in public, they were still offended by and quietly seething at the
suggestion that poverty and other difficulties of African-Americans were
the fault of past and present white racism – instead of laziness as
they had always believed. They still needed to believe their teachers
were truthful when they taught the historical hoax that enslaved people
actually liked slavery in the 1850s, and were happy to have been brought
to America – saved from cannibalism, paganism and bestiality. That
generation of southern men were not generally supporters of the Ku Klux
Klan or racial violence, but at their core they enjoyed the idea that
the continued use of the flag bothered the people who so bothered them.
They didn’t care a whit – or generally even know a whit – about the true
history of the flag or their own connections to the slave-holders
rebellion, but they relished how this antiseptic and increasingly
invoked “heritage” propaganda innocently explained the battle flag
and could be used to goad the critics they so despised.
But time
marched on those gentlemen. Those aging white males are no longer the
overwhelmingly dominant cohort in the southern states – just as those
white voters are declining in political control of the South. Hence
Virginia, Florida and North Carolina are presidential battleground
states. Georgia is in play. Not many people are so obtuse still to
believe that the declining performance educationally and economically of
white males in rural America, especially the South, is because of
affirmative action or because black people today are allowed to go to
high school, and to vote.
We all understand pretty clearly now
that a Dylann Roof actually has to stand on his own two feet. He can’t
depend on an entrenched system of silent abuse and unspoken
conspiracy to prevent women or African-Americans from seeking the same
entry level job that Dylann might have desired. He can’t count on
“heritage” and tradition to make sure that the majority of the black
kids in his town can’t get an education sufficient to seek upwardly
mobile employment – as
heritage and customs guaranteed for 150
years. The Dylann Roofs of the world have to actually compete now. And
for the first time in at least a century, they actually have to be men
now – not just members of cowardly mobs protecting themselves with
violence and intimidation, and always anonymously. We all understand
that now, at least on some level. The government isn’t going to ensure
your success by openly harming black people for you anymore, white man.
You’re actually on your own now. The petty complaints and invented
aggrievements of that generation – blaming black people for all their
woes – make sense to a smaller and smaller group of other people now.
Even the sons of the men who still feverishly insisted on that pitiful,
self-emasculating logic 20 and 30 years ago increasingly don’t get their
own dads anymore.
It’s not dissimilar to what happened with gay
marriage: at some point the hollow nature of ridiculously inflexible
positions simply begins to be obvious – especially when confronted by
some event so clearly horrifying and indefensible as what happened in
Charleston.
That’s the reality that Dylann Roof – and the rest of
his scraggly, stupid ilk – are truly reeling from. Their own inadequacy.
Their own failures. The slow disappearance of the certainty that all
the white men will look out for all the other white men first – and
somehow still save some kind of place even for the broken,
intellectual runts like him. The Dylann Roofs of American today
instinctively realize that their day is past. He never even had that
day. They see white girls at school making the very rational choice to
prefer over them black boys who are actually going somewhere. They
discover that the police are willing to arrest them too for their petty
drug schemes – and that harsh sentencing laws will wreck their
misbegotten lives too.
Even the people that the Dylann Roofs once
imagined might be allies now profess politics in which white losers like
him – along with everyone else – are on their own. The government isn’t
here to help anymore. There is no certainty. Just being white isn’t
good enough, Dylann.
So a Dylann Roof lashes out in the perverse
way that such an inadequate, violence-intoxicated mind can invent,
swathed in the ideas and imagery so intertwined with the Confederate
battle flag today. Yet, his rampage becomes a renunciation of whatever
little honorable character attached to that symbol long ago. When my
great-great grandfather and the rebels fighting with him to dismantle
the United States charged up the hill called Little Round Top on July 2,
1863, in a decisive moment of the Battle of Gettysburg, they and their
flag made clear who they were and the wrongs they were fighting for. We
can at least give them that. And a third of the regiment of 1,500 fell
on the battlefield that day, repulsed, thankfully, by soldiers defending
the America we live in now.
Perhaps the Confederate battle flag did represent some sort of misguided valor back then. But no more.
Today,
it stands for Dylann Roof, a wretch unable even to meaningfully
articulate his anger at being required to take responsibility for
himself, enraged at being forced to compete and survive in a world
finally glimmering with at least a potential for equality. It stands for
a coward like him, stripped of the protection of the lynching mobs that
would have carried his flag. It stands for a loser without the spine to
tell the people he found at Emanuel church who he truly was or what he
truly believed – until he already had his gun trained on them. It stands
for people like him who lie – by omission or commission – about their
intentions. It stands for a murderer who could only savage the
defenseless–who was so blind and terrified by his own emptiness that he
would assault the only people who actually wanted to help him.
What bloodless shell of a person would choose to fly such a flag now? Finally, all who are willing can see that.
The views expressed in this post are the author’s alone, and presented here to offer a variety of perspectives to our readers.
Douglas A. Blackmon is the Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II,
and co-executive producer of the acclaimed PBS documentary of the same
name. His is also a contributing editor at The Washington Post and chair
and host of Forum, a public affairs program produced by the
University of Virginia’s Miller Center and aired on more than 100 PBS
affiliates across the US.
Supporters
of keeping the Confederate battle flag flying at a Confederate monument
at the South Carolina Statehouse wave flags during a rally in front of
the statehouse in Columbia, S.C., on Saturday, June 27, 2015. Gov. Nikki
Haley and a number of other state leaders have called for the removal
of the flag following the shooting deaths of nine black parishioners in a
church in Charleston last week. (AP Photo/Bruce Smith)(Credit: AP)
