Is the confederate Flag a symbol for the South's rich heritage or a reminder of hatred and slavery?
The killing of nine African Americans inside a Charleston, South Carolina, church last week by a suspect who appears to have decorated online declarations of his white supremacist views with the Confederate battle flag has returned debate over the flag to the national stage.
Is the flag a quintessentially racist symbol? Recent polling suggests that for about half of
Americans, the answer may be as brief as the question is basic: yes.
The flag was first sewn for an army that fought to preserve in the United States the legally sanctioned slavery of African Americans. Racist hate groups continue to love the flag for something more than its aesthetic appeal. For most African Americans, especially, the meaning of the flag is clear.
“Certainly symbolically, we cannot have the Confederate flag waving in the state capitol,” the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) president, Cornell William Brooks, said in Charleston last week, referring to a banner that flies at a memorial to Confederate soldiers on the grounds of the South Carolina statehouse. Hundreds of protesters, black and white, marched on the statehouse at the weekend to demand the flag’s removal.
Yet the flag has its defenders who insist that it does not express hatred. Many of those voices have become scarce in the days since the Charleston shooting. Elected officials and public figures who have vocally defended the Confederate flag in the past and who ignored repeated requests for comment or declined to answer questions for this story include the president of the College of Charleston, the president pro tempore of the South Carolina state senate and a former speaker of the state house of representatives.
Those who were willing to talk about their devotion to the Confederate flag said, among other things, that it honors soldiers killed in the American civil war who were fighting out of a sense of duty to God and family – not hatred.
Ben Jones is the chief of heritage operations for the Sons of Confederate Veterans and traces multiple lines of ancestry, he said, to soldiers who died fighting for the Confederacy. But he is better known as the actor who played the mechanic Cooter in the 1980s hit television show The Dukes of Hazzard. The heroes in the show drive a car named the General Lee – for the Confederate leader Robert E Lee – which has a Confederate battle flag painted on its roof.
“Symbols mean different things to different people in different contexts,” said Jones, who is also a former Democratic US congressman from the state of Georgia. “When you ask me what it symbolizes, it symbolizes, in a personal way, the courage and the valor of my ancestors, who in their time did what they believed was the right thing to do.”
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Jones, 73, who runs a chain of “Cooter’s Place” outlets in the south that sell Dukes memorabilia including Confederate flag license plates, said the flag had a place in southern culture that had become detached from its history as a battle flag – and from the question of race and racism.
“It’s been used to sell soap, and it’s been used to sell rice, and it’s been used to sell grits, and apples, and travel brochures and beauty pageants, and at race tracks, and it’s been the name of sports teams, and that flag is flown throughout the southern culture in a hundred different ways to mean the spirit of the south – the independent, the rebelliousness of the south,” Jones said.
The argument that the flag is a harmless cultural symbol, however, has withered before. The rapper LL Cool J and country musician Brad Paisley were charged with trivializing slavery for a 2013 collaboration called Accidental Racist. In the song, Paisley says the flag only means that he likes the southern rock bandLynyrd Skynyrd. LL offers: “If you don’t judge my do-rag, I won’t judge your red flag.”
“The song isn’t perfect,” LL Cool J later told talkshow host Ellen DeGeneres, “but what we were talking about is love and not judging people on symbols.”
South Carolina senator Kevin L Bryant, a Republican, said he thought the Confederate flag outside the statehouse “eventually will come down”, and that he would support, with ambivalence, legislation to take it down.
“I’m torn on the issue,” Bryant said. “There’s three groups of people. There’s some that find it offensive. And then there’s a small amount of people who use it as a symbol of hate. And then there’s a large group of folks who have had relatives that fought and died in the war between the states” – a title used by some in the south for the American civil war – who “see it as their heritage.
“I’ve talked to lots of constituents and there’s strong feelings on all sides. It’s just unfortunate that some people, like this murderer in Charleston, use it as a symbol of hate. I don’t think the flag on the statehouse grounds had anything to do with this murderer.”
Jones forcefully disclaimed any link between the flag and the suspect in the Charleston killings, Dylann Roof, whom Jones called a “demented white supremacist”, “a reactionary little drug addict” and “a nowhere man who tried to make a name for himself”.
“These were wonderful people who were murdered by an idiot,” Jones said. “That does not stand for anything. That is a hateful individual.
“What else did he have, a black Hyundai? Is that a symbol of racism?”
South Carolina congressman Doug Brannon, a Republican, has written legislation to remove the flag from the capitol grounds. He described how southerners who seek to honor the memory of their ancestors could still ask for the flag to be removed from the statehouse, where it was first flown in 1962 in order to signal resistance to the forced desegregation of southern schools and public places.
“There’s a number of people in South Carolina that will tell you that flag represents their heritage,” Brannon said. “But the truth of the matter is, those people don’t understand the history of the flag, and the state capitol. That flag may in fact be your heritage. But the flag of your heritage is the flag that was carried by battalions or divisions in a war 150 years ago.
“The flag that I’m talking about is the one that was put on the state capitol dome in 1962 in response to desegregation. So … it’s two separate issues.
“The flag of their heritage is fine for them. And their flag of heritage needs to be in a museum. The flag that I’m talking about was put up by a bunch of white guys in 1962 in response to desegregation. And that’s not heritage. That’s hate.”
State senator John Matthews was one of the African American leaders of the legislature who led the fight to take the flag off the capitol dome, where it was raised until 2000, and plant it in front of the Confederate memorial.
“To African Americans, we saw it as suppression,” Matthews told the Guardian in an interview last week. “We at the state are evolving from where we were, to where we need to be. A lot of people in this state are good people moving on and moving up. But some of the old south is still lingering.”
The Confederate memorial to which the flag attracting the current controversy is attached is one vestige of the old south. It was dedicated in 1879, just 14 years after the civil war ended and four years after the statehouse itself was finished.
Here’s how the monument explains itself:
“This monument perpetuates the memory, of those who true to the instincts of their birth, faithful to the teachings of their fathers, constant in their love for the state, died in the performance of their duty: who have glorified a fallen cause by the simple manhood of their lives, the patient endurance of suffering, and the heroism of death, and who, in the dark hours of imprisonment, in the hopelessness of the hospital, in the short sharp agony of the field, found support and consolation in the belief that at home they would not be forgotten.”
But Gwendolyn Neal, a black woman who was born and raised in South Carolina and was interviewed by the Guardian at the capitol over the weekend, said the flag was offensive, full stop: “It’s always going to be a slap in the face, as long as it’s up there.”
As proposals to ban the Confederate flag gain momentum across the South in the wake of the Charleston church massacre, a civil-rights group is warning that white supremacists will try to exploit any backlash as a recruitment tool.
Officials at the Southern Poverty Law Center say fringe groups are framing the removal of the flag as "cultural genocide."
"There's no question that organized white supremacy right now is using the battle flag as a rallying cry for their views," said Heidi Beirich, Intelligence Project director for the center.
Neo-Confederate and white-pride groups say the flag is a symbol of Southern heritage and a memorial to Civil War dead — not a symbol of the racist views of Dylann Roof, the white gunman who killed nine black church members last week.
Loud calls to take down the flag from the South Carolina capital and from other government-sponsored locations has opponents planning rallies and mulling boycotts.
On a forum run by the white-supremacist group Stormfront, members are chatting about buying flag stickers in bulk and slapping them up at their local Walmart to protest the retail giant's decision to stop selling Confederate merchandise.
"I say boycott Walmart or any other business which refuses to sell Confederate Flags, which are simply a part of American and Southern history and heritage," one forum member wrote.
A Facebook page run by Defenders of the Confederate Cross has invited hundreds of people to attend a Saturday protest at the South Carolina Statehouse in Columbia.
"Lets make our stand and show overwhelming support to keep the flag were it is or place it back on top of the dome!" says the invitation. At mid-morning, 42 people had replied that they would attend.
Related: Tide Turning? Mississippi GOP Leader Says Banish Confederate Flag
The League of the South, which is pushing for secession, is also planning a protest in Columbia this weekend, though it has not announced details.
"I would like to see several thousand people," said Pat Hines, head of the group's South Carolina chapter.
"Obviously, the politicians are rushing to get the law changed while everyone is excited about the deaths of these people," Hines added, referring to the church massacre.
"I don't see the connection," he said. "We certainly didn't advocate the murders of random people like that."
Michael German, who infiltrated white supremacist groups during a 16-year FBI career, said the organizations should not be underestimated.
"White supremacist groups are recruiters so they're constantly going out trying to seek new people, trying to spread their message. And they can do that," he said.
"They have radio shows, they have internet shows, they have rock bands that tour around the United States. So this is an ideology that has been around for a long time."
Beirich said some defenders of the flag could be riled up enough to get sucked into the white-supremacy culture.
"It is entirely possible that people who are maybe a couple steps into racist thinking will see the battle flag coming under attack and believe that they should be activists in support of a pro-South view, which frankly is a pro-white view when it comes to the battle flag," she said.
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