On October 12, 2015, some 15 suspects were charged with “terroristic, gang-related activities” after they participated in a convoy of pick-up trucks and other vehicles flying the Confederate Battle Flag, and harassed an innocent family in a park, making threatening and racist slurs, and threatening the family’s children. This event (which occurred on July 25, 2015) took place as part of a large-scale, racial backlash against an effort to remove the Confederate Battle Flag from state government properties in South Carolina and elsewhere. The racial backlash ironically joined with other voices of the south to argue that the Confederate Battle Flag is a legitimate symbol of “southern heritage” (and therefore of the South itself) and is not necessarily or predominantly a symbol of the South’s racist past (or present).
In the backlash of the “flag issue” of 2015, what public protests took place in defiance of the “flaggers” of Georgia and other states using the flag as a deliberate statement of racism? There were no such. Those seeking to protect the “honor” of the flag found offense in those decrying the flag’s racist past, but did nothing to jettison its continuing importance as a racist symbol. If those wishing both to protect the Confederate Battle Flag and to deny its racist connections only attack those taking the flag down, but not those adding to its racist legacy, they merely feed the fires of both racial antagonism and the flag issue as a separate question.
Taking the opposite view were commentators such as native Texan Mac McCann, a student and writer for the Chicago Tribune, the Huffington Post, and various Texan publications. McCann noted specifically that confusing the Confederate Battle Flag with anything other than the purpose for which it was designed, a rally of pro-slavery secessionists against their own Southern Unionist and anti-slavery brethren, in defense of the deliberately slavery-preserving institution of the Confederacy, is a betrayal of the real legacy of Southern pride and honor. This argument has far better support from the historical record.
While pride in the land of one’s birth is a normal feeling among most people, the confusion of pride in the South with the legacy of the Confederate Battle Flag ignores far too many proud moments of the South’s history, and focuses in fact on the more ugly ramifications of “Southern heritage,” in denoting a land whose people fought for the defense of the preservation of slavery, and then struggled violently after their military defeat to subjugate the race they had fought to maintain as their servants. In fact, it is difficult to find, among those wishing to identify the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of the South, those who identify with or lionize the Southern Unionists who opposed secession, or who after secession (especially in East Tennessee, West Virginia, and parts of Alabama) struggled to retain connections with the North. Southerners would, of course, be cautioned not to fly the Battle Flag too close to the ghosts of Southern Unionists who died fighting Confederate troops marching under that flag. Southerners fighting for freedom in the Civil War saw the Battle Flag for what it was – a symbol of treason, secession, and slavery.
In fact, those identifying the Battle Flag as a symbol of the south in general very deliberately avoid associating with non-racist or anti-racist symbols of the South. Southerners fighting the good fight for freedom, against the institution of slavery and against the secession designed to preserve it, seem to disappear into the void as the Battle Flag flies. This decries the true honor and legacy of the South, a land that contributed over two hundred thousand of its young men (white and black) to the Union Army to fight against the slave-holding Confederacy. In fact, while records from the South make it difficult to ascertain precise numbers, the number of white Southerners who fought for the Union may number as much as a third (though probably somewhat less) of the number who fought for the Confederacy. In addition to t