SYMBOLISM WATCH : Waving the Flag

Sunday’s Super Bowl will be played in Atlanta’s new domed stadium, and that city’s leaders hope the football game will be just the start of two years of positive publicity for their hometown, leading up to the summer of 1996, when Atlanta will host the Olympics. But that fine city is saddled with an unfortunate symbol as it steps onto the national, and international, stage--the Georgia state flag.

The most prominent feature of Georgia’s flag is not the state seal but the battle flag of the old Confederacy--13 stars arrayed on crossed bars against a red background. The state Legislature redesigned the flag in 1956, in a nose-thumbing gesture after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling outlawed segregation.

Understandably, many African Americans consider such an open, official display of the Confederate flag to be an insult, symbolizing an old--thankfully defeated--South, where slavery and white supremacy were law. That’s why civil rights activists will protest at Sunday’s football game. They hope to embarrass Georgia into ridding itself of a racist symbol.

We hope they succeed. Think what world reaction would be if Germany, for whatever perverse reason, were to redesign its flag to feature the Nazi swastika. Many Americans, not all of them black, consider the “Stars and Bars” every bit as hateful a symbol.

If individuals want to display the Confederate flag, they have that right. But giving it official standing is unacceptable. Georgia should get rid of it before the world, including many athletes of color, comes visiting in 1996.