he free whites of the South, freed and runaway slaves (as well as some of the very small, free black population of the South) also joined the fight for the Union and for freedom. But those who today fly the Confederate Battle Flag as a symbol of their “southern pride” spit on both the whites and the blacks of the South who fought to defeat the mission of those flying that flag – the preservation of slavery and of a racist society.
The flag problem can be seen in the context of two separate questions: what symbol(s) do “southern pride” proponents use, and what symbols don’t they use? It is easy for racists to identify with the Confederate Battle Flag, and with images of John Calhoun, Jefferson Davis, and Bobby Lee. But those, white or black, who fought and died to make the South a better place by freeing it of the moral stain of slavery rarely end up being symbols of “southern pride.” Those faces are not, to southern racists, any symbol they choose to be proud of. Nor are the faces of the Little Rock Nine, or Ruby Nell Bridges, or MLK, or leaders of the Southern Poverty Law Center, or other pioneers of the civil rights movement. Yet these southern freedom fighters made both the South and the US as a whole a better, and freer place. That those seeking to keep the Confederate Battle Flag flying do not generally identify with such powerful images of southern pride and heritage, tells anyone caring to listen, loudly and clearly, just what “southern pride and heritage” really means – the belief that a racially ordered society is normal, acceptable, even laudable, and worthy of its defense and preservation.
Ultimately, the “flaggers” of Georgia and elsewhere demonstrate, in concert with those quietly disapproving of the efforts to remove the flag from state offices, that their pride is not at all in the South, but in their racist identity and worldview. They refuse to accept legitimate symbols of pride that represent freedom, and instead embrace a warped and limited pride in one faction of the South, seeking to preserve a dying legacy of racial hatred. Their anger at those identifying the obvious connection between the Confederate Battle Flag and racism is not due to any misunderstanding or simplification of southern history by those wanting to take down the flag (a sin which the flag’s “defenders” themselves are at fault for committing), but due only to their guilt at being caught out in the immoral act of promoting racism and oppression in a supposedly democratic land.