symposium

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 28, 2000 | by Armstrong Williams, | Walter E. Williams

Q: Should the Confederate Battle flag be banned from All public buildings?

Yes: We should not give support to an obvious relic of slavery and racial exclusion.

I am a South Carolina native, and often find myself hard at work pushing my fond South Carolina recollections on my friends. My newspaper column, published by the Los Angeles Times Syndicate, is the most widely circulated commentary in South Carolina. From my family's farm in Marion County to my education at South Carolina State University, from this humble stretch of land called home, spring my sight, my memories, my sense of values and my soul.

Strom Thurmond, the iconoclastic eight-term Republican senator from South Carolina, is my mentor and former employer. It was during a visit to his office last year that I decided to revisit my position on the Confederate battle flag. During the course of our casual conversation, he inquired how much I really know about the Confederate battle flag that flies over the South Carolina Statehouse. He proceeded to inform me that the flag went up during the governorship of Fritz Hollings (currently the state's Democratic junior senator) in 1962 as part of South Carolina's centennial celebration and that the flag was to be removed immediately following the celebration.

To my surprise, Thurmond was adamant that that flag should have come down following the centennial celebration. Some 38 years later, the Confederate battle flag remains fixed upon the statehouse, igniting passions as a dual symbol of Southern heritage and racial divisiveness. During the course of our tete-a-tete, Thurmond encouraged me to further my research so as to draw my own conclusions.

So, as a proud native of South Carolina, I am deeply sensitive to the fact that the flag of the Confederate States of America continues to flap over the statehouse of South Carolina. I am not alone in this regard. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, or NAACP, ignited op-ed sections across the country when it recently initiated a tourism boycott of South Carolina in an effort to remove the flag.

What the NAACP (along with 70 percent of South Carolina natives) was attempting to say was that there is a time when politicians must transcend political expediency and stand on moral principle. The Confederate battle flag of South Carolina is more than just a state issue. It is a national issue that resonates with every American who believes that we should not give support to any relic of slavery or racial exclusion.

War has many meanings: Some unbearably sad, some inhumane and some still hopeful. At the center of its fat, ruinous heart though, war is a set of conditions by which people are ordered to kill strangers. In the great antiwar novels and films of our time, the whole grand blessing of life slowly dissolves under brutish force. In such literature the honor, patriotism and courage of soldiers are juxtaposed with the numbing effects of battle. Rarely, though, is the great antiwar statement told from the perspective of the vanquished -- from the perspective of those who sacrificed their land, their love, their world for a lost cause.

This is the suppressed perspective of the South, which in 1861 fought a war with the North for the right to secede from the Union. Many of the brave men who rushed to defend the South did not rush toward death but to defend life, to sacrifice for their homes, their heritage and their flag. The young men who volunteered to defend the South were driven by a spirit ingrained in patriotic peoples of all times and all great nations: from the Roman farmers who left their fields to defend the Republic to the American minutemen. Ah, but was their spirit misplaced?

By the time Gen. Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox, the Southern landscape had been littered with piles of twisted human bodies. It rarely is noted these days that white Southerners are the only Americans who have had to deal with the tragedy of having lost a protracted, devastating war. So the question I would pose is: How did the South keep the damage from infecting its mind and spirit? Robert Penn Warren, among other Southern historians, has pointed out that the South dealt with this tragedy largely by denying it: Confederate President Jefferson Davis, Lee and other Confederate leaders were romanticized as gallant soldiers fighting against hopeless odds. And the Confederate battle flag became a nostalgic symbol of a uniquely Southern heritage.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up to celebrate this legacy. Nowadays, the greatest upheaval of American history is fondly reenacted throughout the South by grown men who dress up in uniforms and blow bugles. The crack of the musket and the Confederate battle flags are proudly recalled. Thus have Southerners reimagined their bloody misadventure with heavy doses of pageantry and nostalgia. Yet the South did not move forward without the artifice of illusion or the sin of denial. And this is perhaps the best explanation of why the Confederate battle flag continues to fly over the South Carolina Capitol (a building erected for the benefit of all races and religions).