Why Is Symbol of Confederacy Flying?

With less than a month before the opening ceremony of the summer Olympic Games, the South, so eager to show the world its shiny new multicultural self, will instead be showing it a more shopworn one. I am not just talking about the more than three dozen black churches burned by arson. I am talking about yet another example of seemingly pre-civil-rights-style white racism: The Confederate battle emblem will officially wave over many of Atlanta’s Olympic venues, including the Georgia Dome, while America’s Dream Team will be inside torching its international competition like Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman once torched the city itself.

As one of the many state buildings being commandeered for the Olympics, the Georgia Dome will fly the Georgia state flag, and two-thirds of the Georgia state flag happens to be the cross of St. Andrews--better known as the Confederate battle emblem. Furthermore, this provocative symbol is not some historic vestige of the Confederacy, but was tacked on to the state flag a century later--in 1956. It was the state Legislature’s none-too-subtle way of protesting the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Eventually, Alabama, Mississippi and South Carolina followed Georgia’s lead.

The Georgia Coalition to Change the Flag, a group including black state elected officials, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Rainbow Coalition, labor and Jewish organizations, is planning demonstrations, of course. But it could be that, after the derision heaped on Jesse Jackson for his Academy Award protest, the days of placards and minimarches are behind us. And like this year’s Oscars, what makes an Olympic protest all the more awkward is that these Atlanta Olympics are the “blackest” in history. Bill Campbell, the current mayor of Atlanta, and former mayors Maynard Jackson and Andrew Young spearheaded the campaign to get the city the Olympics in the first place. Little Richard, B.B. King and the Morehouse and Spelman College glee clubs are all to be part of the opening ceremonies.

The same coalition complained loudly in 1994, when the state hosted the Super Bowl, yet the then state overseer of the Georgia Dome insisted, “It is our state flag and we have no problem with it.” Thus the symbol of slavery waved over the year’s finest black and white football players.

The issue boils down to: What does that flag represent? Is it, as some Civil War reenacters might insist, simply a proud symbol of their historic determination and defiance? Or, more simply, is it a Southern swastika? Is there anything benign about “Gone With the Wind”--which portrays slavery as merely steady employment?

Alabama state Sen. Charles Davidson recently introduced a bill trying to get the rebel flag flying again over the Capitol. Davidson said the Bible justified the enslavement of blacks, and that slavery wasn’t so bad but propaganda like “Roots” made it seem worse than it really was.

I’m a black Northerner (whose ancestors escaped from Selma, Ala., at the outbreak of the Civil War), so you know where I stand. I would hope that not only African Americans but all Americans sympathetic to the unimaginable pain of slavery and the continuing evil of white supremacy, would have a hard time celebrating the enduring symbol of one of the world’s longest-running crimes against humanity.

On this one issue, white supremacist, antigovernment hate groups seem to agree with me. The Confederate battle emblem (it was never the Confederacy’s national flag) is even more popular than the Nazi swastika among American white extremists. Many Klansmen have mothballed their hoods in favor of camouflage jumpsuits and baseball caps sporting the rebel flag. The skinheads, Aryan Nation, patriot, freemen and militia movements all talk of blacks and other U.S. minorities as “mud people” and seem to worship the Confederacy as a glorious experiment in armed insurrection. For the last days of their 81-day standoff, the freemen--who proclaimed, “When we move into a new land, we are to kill all the inhabitants of the other races,”--replaced their upside-down U.S. flag with the, you guessed it, rebel cross and stars. And Montana, about as north as you can get in this country, wasn’t even a state during the Civil War!

The vitriolic response of many white Southerners to removing that flag from over many state Capitols is a bellwether to the poisonous climate in which our nation now finds itself. Can there be any doubt that there is at least an ideological connection between the now nearly weekly burnings of black churches and the hate spewed by the Aryan Nation and the militias?

Of course, the majority of whites who continue to cling to that offensive flag can only be accused of acute insensitivity and not acts of terror against the state. But there is certainly a continuum from those merely nostalgic for a long-dead slavocracy to those calling for radically less federal government (meaning cut welfare and affirmative action, not military spending), to paranoid anarchist extremists convinced blacks and Jews have hijacked this once-proud nation so white Christian men have to take it back with semi-automatic weapons.

When GOP presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan, on the campaign trail this spring at the South Carolina state capital championed that state’s right to fly its rebel flag, his code was clear. “States’ rights” has long been a Southern rallying cry, used to justify their right to segregate and denigrate millions of their citizens. Buchanan’s nostalgia for the days before race-mixing was predictable; but Bob Dole and Lamar Alexander, then also stumping in South Carolina, when asked what they thought about the 1950s addition to South Carolina’s state flag invoked states’ rights themselves. Dole, if he is not courting the white supremacist vote, still has some explaining to do.

The fans, the entertainers, the athletes and all the corporate sponsors of the Olympics need to stand up now and say to those still clinging to the Confederate flag that their continued public humiliation of the descendants of the enslaved ends here today. President Bill Clinton needs to stand up to Georgia and the rest of the offending Southern states and say, “Not on my watch.”

Georgia Gov. Zell Miller, in 1993, courageously came out against the revised state flag. He proclaimed in the statehouse, “We have long since repudiated every element of those shameful 1956 days of defiance--except for the flag they created.” Many white Georgians went nuts, and at least one legislator is reported to have booed him. Miller retreated from that noble stand and hasn’t said boo about the flag since.

Sadly, neither have the African Americans responsible for bringing the Olympics to Atlanta. Most of Georgia’s black leaders seem so intoxicated with the prestige and money showering on their state this summer that they seem willing to swallow this public degradation.

I was only 6 years old when John Carlos and Tommie Smith raised their black-gloved fists high in the air at the 1968 Mexico City Olympic Games, yet I will never forget that image. How exhilarating it would be if basketball’s Dream Team had the nerve to make a statement as bold.*