Reply #9: The confederate flag [View All]

[florida08]

stands for segregation:

As someone who grew up around Confederate flags and the white folks who love them (Southern by the grace of God, as they say), I can attest to this: most of these kids (and their parents) are scarcely aware of their history. They have romanticized their Confederate ancestors as noble defenders of independence, and while that’s in some sense understandable (no one likes to think poorly of their ancestors), it does ignore the fact that the Confederacy was explicitly founded on a theology of divinely-ordained white supremacy.

What’s more, even the “heritage” defense betrays a deep ignorance of history; although the Confederate flag (in various incarnations) was flown throughout Reconstruction and into the 20th century, the Confederate flag as we recognize it (the “stars and bars) didn’t come into popular use until the 1950s and the beginning of federally-mandated desegregation, where it was used primarily to signal opposition to desegregation. Insofar that it was supposed to represent Southern “heritage,” it was a sign that the flyer respected the long-standing Southern tradition of apartheid and racial violence. As historian John Hoski explains in his book on the subject, this was a pretty explicit sentiment:
http://is.gd/bqRsZ

Roy V. Harris, the recently retired speaker of the Georgia House of Representatives and editor of the Augusta Courier, minced no words in linking the threat to his embrace of the Confederate flag in 1951. ”The Confederate flag is coming to mean something to everybody now. It means the southern cause. It means the heart throbs of the people of the South. It is becoming to be the symbol of the white race and the cause of white people. The Confederate flag means segregation.”