What is Southern Heritage?

[Uncle Joe]

232. Personally, I find it enriching, the South's culture and its expanded influence

throughout the nation has proven this, in the form of music, art, literature, poetry, cuisine, general lifestyle etc. etc. etc.

Having said that, having more than one race or ethnicity does present increased challenges involving interracial relations to politics and all points in between.

The poverty of the South goes all the way back at least to the Civil War's massive destruction both in lives and property with a major turning point being FDR's New Deal, and the TVA bringing electricity to much of the region for the first time in the 1930s.

Poverty greatly limits your choices beginning with education, nutrition, to the politicians that you can choose from to whether you can risk promoting a union at work.

The South has been changing becoming much more prosperous beginning in the 1970s and 1980s but that was well over a century after the end of the Civil War.

Jim Crow owes its promotion to the North as much as the South, beginning with Plessy vs Ferguson when it became the law of the land in 1896, 31 years after the Civil War ended.

Other than Andrew Johnson's less than one term, no President came to power from a Southern State until Woodrow Wilson in 1912, the North dominated the Congress and the White House.

The Supreme Court Justices that decided Plessy vs Ferguson by a 7-1 margin were appointed and confirmed by those politicians.

Ironically the lone dissenting Justice in Plessy vs Ferguson came from Kentucky and was born to a prominent slave holding family in that state. Some people argue that John Marshall Harlan held racist views as well, exhibited in the writings of his dissent but that's the way reality was in those days, racism was abundance in all quarters of the nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plessy_vs_Ferguson

I see symbols in the same light as art, the interpretation of said object is dependent upon the perspective or prism that a person is viewing it from, all dependent on that person's culture, environment, life experiences and history.

People fought and died in that war for a multitude of different reasons, all with their own personal motivations, experiences and agendas, I listed just two examples up-thread, Generals Cleburne and Sherman.

The former didn't care about slavery and argued that slaves should be armed and allowed to fight for their freedom, he fought under the Confederate Flag, the latter supported slavery and sympathized with the South, he fought under the Stars and Stripes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Cleburne

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Tecumseh_Sherman

Make no mistake about it, if Generals on both sides of that conflict can have such contradictory moral positions, the same holds true for the mass of soldiers, some were fighting to preserve or abolish slavery, some were fighting to preserve or leave the Union, some were fighting because family members, long time friends had been killed in the conflict and took up arms for revenge sake, some were fighting simply to protect their towns, villages, states and/or region from what they perceived as a threat, some didn't even volunteer but were drafted or conscripted especially later in the war as the pools of manpower were depleted, some fought simply because they couldn't afford to pay a bounty for someone else to go and fight in their place, in many ways this was a rich man's war and poor man's fight.

The descendants of these soldiers and other people that identify with the South fly or support the Confederate Flag for just as many if not more reasons of their own. I have no doubt racists, fanatics, lunatics and people of ill intention fly the Confederate Flag but the same can be said for Old Glory.