Articles and Debating Opinions Over what the Confederate Flag stands for and Should it be Flying Over the Sout Carolina State house?
You be the judge...
Read these articles and decide. Does the confederate flag stand for hate? Or does it represent the heritage of the citizens of the southern states? Should it still be flying over the SC State House? Or on a monument on the state house grounds? Or should it be banished from public view? This is a major issue to many southerners these days. What needs to be considerated is "What does the flag stand for and who has the right to decide what it means?"
Battles over the flag symbol breaking out across the deep South
Tuesday, March 14, 2000
By BRIAN HICKS Of The Post and Courier staff
Associated Press COLUMBIA - Confederate flag supporters say that both sides of the issue can flex their boycott muscles. The Keep It Flying South Carolina Foundation will announce Thursday that flag supporters will boycott South Carolina Chamber of Commerce members who support removing the flag from the Statehouse dome and legislative chambers, said John Brannen, the group's chairman. "It will be the entire collection of all the heritage groups in the state," Brannen said. Businesses "will see the overwhelming majority of this state honors the brave soldiers of the Confederacy," he said. "Boycotts from anybody, whether its from Keep it Flying or the NAACP are counterproductive to finding a compromises that our Legislature can adopt and that can have all of our people moving forward together," chamber spokeswoman Deb Woolley said. James Gallman, president of the South Carolina Conference of Branches of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said he doesn't expect the pro-flag boycott to be effective. "I doubt those businesses will miss what little dollars (flag supporters) would generate," Gallman said. Sen. Glenn McConnell, R-Charleston, said he has heard about the plans. As one of the Senate's most ardent flag supporters, he dropped chamber of commerce memberships for his business more than a year ago, disputing its policy on the flag and other issues. McConnell said the move isn't a sign of desperation among Confederate flag supporters because "the flag is secure at the dome." There's been no agreement on where the flag will be moved. "Looks like to me they are giving the chamber something to worry about besides the flag," McConnell said. Woolley doesn't expect the boycott to be effective economically, but it does show the degree of frustration on both sides of the issue. The Confederate flag has flown on the Statehouse dome since 1962. The NAACP launched a boycott of the state's tourism industry in January to force the flag's removal. Some people see the flag as a symbol of hate and others as a symbol of heritage. Keep It Flying's efforts earlier this year to sway public pinion on the flag got the attention of the state Ethics Commission last week. The commission is investigating whether the group violated state campaign finance laws when it mailed letters attacking Democratic Gov. Jim Hodges. The letter also criticized Republican presidential hopeful John McCain and praised his rival Texas Gov. George W. Bush and was mailed just days before the Feb. 19 GOP primary. The Ethics Commission is investigating whether Keep It Flying should have to register as a political action committee and disclose campaigns.
SELMA, Ala. - At the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a faded image of the Confederate battle flag welcomes you to town. The flag is the main part of the city's seal and, hanging from an old iron sign, it makes for an odd juxtaposition alongside a new billboard advertising a civil rights memorial park to be built on the site. It's the same mixed message we found the day before in Montgomery, and one we had come to expect in Alabama. In Montgomery, civil rights and civil war seem to co-exist. Here, however, they appear at odds. Cresting the bridge, the old city comes into view. Two lines of storefronts sit facing each other across a main street with angled parking. The town looks as if it hasn't changed much since the early, violent days of the civil rights movement. On the Pettus Bridge in 1965, Alabama state troopers and sheriff's deputies beat marchers on their way to Montgomery to protest the fact that blacks could not vote in Selma.Today, the historic bridge just looks like the rest of the city - old and outdated. But nothing in this town changes very quickly. At the bottom of the city side of the bridge, the National Voting Rights Museum takes up space in a small, old storefront. What it lacks in modern fixtures and fancy exhibits, it makes up for with character. On one wall there is a mural of the bridge, and stuck on it are about 500 little cards. The cards are printed with the words "I was there" and have lines for people who took part in the Bloody Sunday march to write down their recollections of it. Down the main hallway are framed photos of black elected officials from around the country - the product of the Voting Rights Act. One photo shows the "Alabama State Legislature Black Caucus 1990-94" - the ones arrested for trying to climb the statehouse dome to remove the Confederate flag. In many rooms there are photos of Martin Luther King Jr. in the early days, pre-"I Have a Dream." Here the photos look different than television images of the civil rights leader. King has been so mythologized, seeing him in candid shots walking around downtown Selma, around the corner from where you stand, is haunting. In a back room of the museum, JoAnn Blanchard is having a very loud phone conversation, arguing with soft drink vendors about the coming big event. In a couple of weeks, Selma will pay homage to the 35th anniversary of Bloody Sunday, and President Clinton is coming to town. Everything has to be perfect. Blanchard is a whirlwind of activity, a no-nonsense woman who opens up and becomes more friendly after we tell her why we've come. She asks, "Did you hear me yelling at the Coke man?" Blanchard is the museum's tour director and a local activist. And, a few months ago, she was fighting pro-flag forces. "We just recently had the Confederate flag removed from our city seal," she says. "It is a slap in the face - they still put them on our interpretations." The "interpretations" are large, mounted signs erected along the sidewalks in the nearby George Washington Carver Homes. They tell the story of the civil rights movement, and Selma's substantial role in it. The white signs feature black and white photos of Bloody Sunday marchers, including King. In the bottom corner of the sign, the City of Selma seal stands out. The only color on otherwise black and white signs is the red and blue of the battle flag. "Thousands of kids from across the country come here to learn history, and this is what they see," Blanchard says. "There were some kids in from California not long ago, and the white kids asked me 'Why is that flag on those interpretations?' Can you believe it? The whites were more offended than the blacks. 'Why is that on there? Is it accidental or on purpose?'"The signs were remodeled by the city last summer and re-hung in the fall - just after the city seal was changed. But city officials said that the signs were printed before the seal change, and it would cost too much money to change. "It doesn't cost that much," Blanchard says. Despite its place in civil rights history, the town is not viewed as the most racially progressive. The white mayor has been in office since Bloody Sunday and blacks - who make up more than 50 percent of the town's population - didn't gain control of city council until the last election. The outgoing council left the mayor a powerful going-away present - it gave him veto power that can only be overriden by six votes. Five of the nine council members are black. Recently, the city did change the name of a housing project that bore the name of Confederate Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest to the Minnie B. Anderson Homes, after a civil rights worker. And Selma's mayor says his views have changed over the years and he now is an ardent supporter of black voting rights. But Blanchard doesn't completely buy it from him - or anyone. "They use those catchwords, like 'unity' and 'multiculturalism,'" she says, then dismissively waves her hand. Subject closed. Walking through Carver Homes, Blanchard points out the apartment where she grew up. There aren't, she says, many opportunities to do better in this town. Selma lies a good 40 miles from the nearest interstate, its schools aren't great, there are few cultural amenities. It all conspires to keep industry away and keep Selma stuck in the 1960s. Blanchard walks by a small convenience store in the Carver Homes and waves to a blind man named Lewis. He calls out to her, "You bringing President Clinton in here?" "Yeah," she says, "I'll try to get ole Slick Willie to come by." Blanchard sees the flag as the symbol of the Ku Klux Klan, the image of Southern hate, the sign of oppression. At a restaurant in town, there is a Confederate flag in an out-of-the-way corner. It is draped over a barrel and a skeleton sits atop it, which Blanchard swears is "an old Indian." "I like their food, but I'm not going in there. If you feel that interprets your history and that's what you want to put out for people to see, I question you. "That flag has a place in history, and there's a place for it - right down there," she says, gesturing to the Selma city museum. On March 5, Blanchard's organizing would pay off when Clinton, Coretta Scott King, Jesse Jackson and some of King's lieutenants from the movement lead 10,000 across the Pettus bridge. Driving west out of Selma, Alabama opens up and flattens up, and there are very few people - and fewer towns. Stereotyped as one of the most racist areas of the country, lower Alabama is actually more integrated than most areas north of the Mason-Dixon line. The only city of size is Demopolis, and the only hint of history in this wide spot in the road is The Heritage Mart (an old Sam's Club) and the Heritage Motel. Neither say to what heritage the names refer. While the Third National Flag of the Confederacy flies at Alabama welcome centers - and the battle flag has begun to pop up on state-approved vanity plates - in very few places do people actually fly The Flag. One recent exception was in York, near the Alabama-Mississippi line off Highway 80. At a small Presbyterian church, the pastor joined the League of the South and took over the church to promote the League's efforts to make the South secede from the Union again. Armed with a court order, the leaders of the church in January kicked the preacher and his new followers out on the street. Today, the church is quiet. Near the Alabama-Mississippi border, the battle flag shows up on a series of Dixie Mart convenience stores. Nobody seems to care one way or another. The signs look like they've been there a long time. As flag sightings increase, it soon becomes clear that Mississippi is a whole 'nother world.
MISSISSIPPI Like Georgia, Mississippi incorporates the battle flag into its state flag design, albeit a little less obviously. The battle banner logo is in the Mississippi flag's canton - its upper left corner, where the field of blue is on the U.S. flag. At a rest stop just across the line, a man walks by the otherwise bland flag and stops reverentially to gaze upward. "It sure looks purty up there, doesn't it?" he asks rhetorically and walks on. Attitudes toward The Old South are a little different in Mississippi. the longing for the land of cotton is much more open, much more in-your-face. At the Travla truck stop in Toomsuba, Miss,. we stop for gas and find a gold mine of silly souvenirs. Here are the license plates featuring a mad Johnny Reb exclaiming, "We don't give a damn how they do it up North!" There are little rebel dolls, bumper stickers and, well, a bunch of other junk. Mostly, though, they sell flags. The truck stop has more flags than a used car lot streamer. Most of them of the Rebel persuasion. The busy little woman behind the counter, Donna Culpepper, says she never gets any complaints about this huge spread of Confederacy memorabilia. Just the opposite, in fact. "Nobody has ever complained," she says. "Most people say, 'Hey, we're glad you have these.' We've got 10 cases of these flags in the back room. Ain't nobody ever had anything to say about it." That is not a universal sentiment in Mississippi. To the north, the University of Mississippi a few years ago put an end to waving the battle flag at Rebel football games by banning flagsticks. For years, there have been lawsuits seeking to remove the emblem from the state flag, where it has been for more than 100 years. Members of the group who want to change the flag say the battle emblem reminds blacks of the 1950s and 1960s, when white supremacist groups furthered their cause by waving it. The Ku Klux Klan was blamed - and its members several times convicted - for killing workers in the civil rights movement. In old news footage of the Klan, the flag is just about everywhere - mounted on car hoods, waving from the front line of protest marches, decorating the stage at every Klan meeting. Mississippi is just as flat as Alabama, but a little more wooded. We cross the state via Interstate 20, which passes through Jackson on its way from Meridian to Vicksburg. The highway runs by Decatur, where a city official recently removed the state flag from police cruisers, saying it was offensive to blacks. Thirty miles west in Jackson, the Capitol is practically draped in the state flag. Mississippi banners are at every corner of the new Statehouse and fly from every state office building orbiting the Capitol. But there are no Confederate flags outside or in the building. Jackson's Capitol, a few blocks north of its old Statehouse, now a museum, is a gorgeously renovated art deco monster. It looks like a 1920s hotel, a place where Jay Gatsby would preside were he a state senator. History has been sterilized in this post-Reconstruction building. As the sun sets over the Mississippi River, we reach te western edge of the state at Vicksburg, site of one of the Civil War's most famous battles. Today, Vicksburg is a remarkably preserved park. But the only flag flying there is the flag of fitness. More joggers take advantage of the park every year, one runner tells us, than there were soldiers on the battlefield. With the sun gone, we decide to skip the jogging and check out the downtown casino before heading south to Natchez. The images on the walls of the casino's entranceway depict a post-Reconstruction South, Mark Twain's universe. Nothing controversial, nothing to offend enough to make you take your money elsewhere. We don't stay long and, after finding no column for gambling losses on our expense report, head south to Natchez. An isolated, and gorgeously preserved antebellum town, it will be nowhere near as historically sanitized as Vicksburg An old flag raises new passions as Southerners fight over its meaning.
Racial tolerance means respecting both heritages
By: Sen. Robert Ford
Originally Published on: 2/26/99
(Sen. Ford, D-Charleston, submitted for publication this speech that he made to the state Senate on Feb. 16 during a debate on allowing Confederate groups to have memorial auto mobile license plates. The bill allowing such plates subsequently passed the Senate.)
Members of the Senate, this is a strange role for me to be in today because four or five years ago I might have made the same comments as did Sen. Ralph Anderson of Greenville or Sen. John Matthews of Orangeburg County, who is the senior African-American senator and chairperson of the S.C. Legislative Black Caucus. The kind of progress we are called upon to make as leaders of the state of South Carolina as we approach the 21st century and the new millennium is progress of tolerance of each others' heritage and cultures. We must set the tone in bringing citizens, both black and white, closer together in our state. We can be a shining example of what true racial tolerance is all about for the whole country and the whole world.
If you look at the fact that in South Carolina, the majority population (white citizens) has a deep love and respect for the Confederate flag and the history and sacrifice that men and women gave for the Confederacy between 1860-1865 when that bloody civil war was fought. This history is passed down from generation to generation, and it will continue to be passed down for the next thousand years. There will always be a deep love and respect for the Confederacy by white Southerners. We cannot change that, and any effort to do so will only further divide the races.
I came to this understanding by having an open mind. When I first came to the South Carolina Senate my mind was closed. There was no discussion on how I felt about the Confederate flag, the Confederacy, or anything else. You are not going to be able to hide the history or stop the teaching of the Confederacy. But if we have an open mind as Christian people and we truly want progress, we can make a difference. I would like to point out that when African-Americans were educated in segregated schools, we were taught with inferior materials. Used materials were handed down to the black schools. Although we learned the same American and Southern histories, it has only been in the past few years that African-American children have had an opportunity to study and learn about African-American scholars. And from this you might say they have learned about the Confederate history from a new standpoint.
The common love I have found in my research is due to my willingness to listen to those who were willing to tell me. I have visited many places and have seen the love that white Southerners have for the Confederacy. It is a deep-rooted love that is not going to change. What has changed is the willingness of senators like Glenn McConnell, J. Verne Smith, Courson, Wilson, and others, who also have a deep love for the Confederacy, to reach out and work for African-Americans on legislation. That is the most important thing. I cannot pass legislation on my own. Sens. Anderson, Matthews, Washington, Glover, Patterson and Jackson, we cannot pass legislation on our own. We need a lot of support. If we are going to support our issues and causes, then we are going to have to bend a little bit, too. As I have said before, this is a different Robert Ford. The people of Charleston would tell you that I would march against and picket the Confederate flag. When I came here as a student in 1967, I led the first demonstration in South Carolina against the Confederate flag. At that time, the Confederate flag had flown over the state Capitol for five years, and I was very much opposed to that. Dr. King was alive. We came here for a retreat and when I asked Dr. King about it, he said, ``That is another issue for another time.'' I am glad Dr. King took that approach. Those of us who were in South Carolina to visit at that time could have fought the fight to take it down. However, Dr. King said, ``No, we need to deal with the basic civil rights.'' What I have learned from the S.C. Senate is that the members are willing to work with African-American causes. I think it would be a sin and a shame if African-Americans didn't make the same concessions. As I have said before, I hate to disagree with my friends on the other side because I am on a strange side this time. I don't believe anyone in the country would expect me to get up here and make this kind of concession, but I have learned to respect Sen. McConnell for what he stands for. I respect each senator who loves the Confederacy. I even attend Confederate activities in Charleston. As a matter of fact one Halloween night, Charleston held what Sen. McConnell would call a ``Ghost Walk.'' Some 25,000 screaming Confederates attended. Two blacks - two African-Americans were there at the scene. One was a young man taking part in activities as a slave, and the other was myself. We were at Magnolia Cemetery, probably the most frightening cemetery in South Carolina. Everyone made me feel welcome. At that time, everyone in Charleston assumed I was probably the militant of black militants who ever lived. They made me welcome. From that day forward I began to learn and understand how these people feel about their heritage. I have learned to respect my heritage and culture much more because of the love they have for theirs.