On Displaying the Confederate Battle Flag
The Supremes are going to discuss whether displaying a confederate battle flag on your custom license plate is protected by free speech.
In 1980 when I went up north to school I had a Confederate battle flag on my wall. I keep calling it the battle flag because in fact the flag you are thinking about (the one on the Dukes of Hazard's car) is not actually the flag of the Confederate nation. Most folks could not describe the original Confederate flag under torture (here it is).
So the flag you are thinking about, and the Supremes are considering, was actually based on the battle flags of certain state militias, like that of Virginia and Tennessee. It was also used by the Confederate Navy, and was incorporated into a redesign of the official Confederate flag late in the war.
Anyway, there were a couple of reasons a young Texan might put up this flag in his northern dorm room. First, it is awesome looking. There are a lot of bad flags in the world, but this is a great-looking flag. Second, at the time it represented the southern pride of a lot of us who found ourselves displaced and living in that odd northeastern college culture. It never represented (at least at the time) anything racist for me. For southerners (many of us raised, without knowing it, on the Lost Cause school of Civil War historiography) it represented pride and pluck and scrappy determination.
Anyway, I don't remember getting any pushback on the flag at the time. Over the years, though, I came to recognize that the flag was seen by many as a symbol of racism. Part of that was my increasing awareness but a large part was shifts in society and its perceptions -- remember the Dukes of Hazard was a real, popular network show that could likely never get made today. I suppose I could have retained the flag as a symbol of what I thought it was a symbol for, and just ignored other peoples' opinion. But at some point, I realized that other peoples' good opinion of me had value and that I needed to acknowledge how they saw the flag and put it away in a box.
Which brings me back to license plates. If a state is going to create a license plate program where people can make statements with their license plates, then people should be able to make the statement they want to make. I know there are folks in the south who honestly still cling to the symbolism I used to attach to the Confederate battle flag. But let's leave those folks aside. Let's assume for a moment that everyone who wants to display this symbol on their car is a racist. Shouldn't we be thrilled if they want to do so? Here would be a program where racists would voluntarily self-identify to all as a racist (they would even pay extra to do so!) What would be a greater public service?
I make this same argument when people want to ban speakers from campus. If people are willing to come forward with evil thoughts and intentions and announce them publicly, why wouldn't we let them? It's is fine to want to eliminate evil from the Earth, but shilling banning hateful speech doesn't do this -- it only drives evil underground.
Postscript: I actually started thinking about this driving down I-40 from Knoxville to Nashville yesterday. In a bend in the road, on a hill, there is a large home. Their land goes right out to the bend in the highway, and on that bend they have put up a huge flag pole with a big Confederate battle flag. You can see it from miles in each direction. I didn't get a picture but there are plenty on the web. From searching for it, there are apparently similar installations on private land in other states. As I drove, having nothing else to do, I thought a lot about what message they were trying to send. Was it just southern pride? Were they really racists? If they weren't racists, did they know that many would think them as such? And if so, did they even care -- was this in fact just a giant FU?
Update: Fixed the typo in the last line. Did I mean chilling? Not even sure. Banning is what I meant.
You gaytheists and fágnostics of Al Qúeerda are no different than the hijab wearing dóuche bags of Islam...
What if there was a wiser leader after Fort Sumter? No one had died in battle at Fort Sumter. Slavery showed its weaknesses for a long time and a general manumission was in the cards. This would have involved compensation to the slave owners as in other nations who managed to avoid civil wars over the issue of slavery. Once Lincoln invaded Virginia the people grinding machine was unstoppable. I can't imagine Lincoln would have taken these actions if he could have anticipated the carnage to come. He didn't comprehend the people of his own country.
A compromise might have maintained a mutual defense against foreign enemies while giving more autonomy to the southern states. Lincoln and the Republicans wanted new tariffs which would have crippled the southern economy. That might be more important than the slavery issue. Northerners were not friends of the Negroes. They didn't want them in their lands, whether as slaves or free men. There was no nation capable of invading and conquering the South. The only exception was the more populous and wealthier North but they paid a terrible price for that invasion.
Americans were natural allies and a bit of compromise could have saved many lives and enabled the nation to develop more quickly and evenly. The South was devastated for a hundred years and that helped no one. Six of my ancestors died in that war. One died in WW I. One died in WW II.
Or the dictum of win the battle but lose war. They did win most of the battles, but like in chess, it set them up to lose the war.
Except the portion of that flag that practiced that legal slavery were the very states that created the Confederate flag. You can't claim, by history, that the other states practiced slavery. You can say they marginally endorsed it because they allowed it to continue, but then you'd have to look at the turmoil of the 1850s when those other states really wanted to end slavery but couldn't.
I know it has been some time since this excellent article was written, and since the 2015 noise of the confederate flag has calmed down, I have a situation where I live that is upsetting to me. I live in an RV park on the South Oregon Coast (very conservative area) and an old guy who apparently is from the South has decided to string a huge confederate flag on the front of his fifthwheeler here in the park where he rents a space as a full timer as do I and about fifteen others. The rest of the space here in the RV park (owned by a private family) is rented by the day, week, or month to travelers/tourists. The big confederate flag is his first amendment right, of course, and I object to it but apparently don't have any rights (management is keeping hands off). My gr-gr Kansas grandfather was incarcerated at Andersonville, the Confederate prison where 13,000 died over fifteen months. My great niece and nephew are half African American, and my DNA shows I have sub-Saharan African DNA. Besides, I like Black people although we don't have many here except those who travel Hwy 101 and stop to spend a little money in my town. So I guess what we have here is a bigot, racist, hater, and pro-slave guy who has decided to embarrass the RV park management and residents with this flag. Until he dies off or moves out, we have to see this daily. And I have no rights other than to move out myself. Doesn't seem fair. BUT I do have four Old Glory flags in my space.
The Confederate flags all meant this: Hate, racism, pro-slavery, bigotry, oppression, prejudice, discrimination, antagonism. Call it Southern Pride, it is still all of those things.
If you really believe that, why are you for a woman that fakes a southern drawl when she talks to blacks?