Olympics Spark Debate Over Georgia Flag’s Confederate Heritage

This afternoon, shortly before the Olympic torch begins the last leg of its journey to the city’s new stadium to signal the start of the XXV Olympiad, another smaller, ragtag relay will begin at the crypt of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Away from the cheering masses, runners will carry the flame through an African American neighborhood that has seen better days and on to the steps of the state Capitol. There they will set fire to the Confederate battle emblem--otherwise known as the state flag--which some political leaders have taken to calling “the American swastika.”

Tonight’s Olympic opening ceremonies will be, among other things, a celebration of the South--a symbolic melding of Atlanta’s twin mythologies as birthplace of both the civil rights movement and “Gone With the Wind.” But, as the planned flag-burning makes clear, these divergent currents of Southern culture have made no peace in the real world.

“We’ll probably be arrested,” protester James Coleman said hopefully. He has waged a two-year legal battle to change the state flag. “We want to bring political pressure on the state and the country,” he said. “We want to embarrass them.”

The Atlanta Olympics have sparked pride throughout the South, a region bound by the bitter strands of a history that includes slavery, war, defeat and a slow, painful reconstruction. That history has created a cohesive identity here unlike any other part of the country.

But the changing South is struggling to redefine itself as it faces the realization that its black and white citizens’ experiences and perceptions of history often are at odds.

At Stone Mountain, the nearby state park that features carved likenesses of Confederate War heroes, a black person may see a monument to white supremacy. A white person may simply see a place to have a good time.

And while black activists have pledged to picket Olympic venues that fly the state flag--which was changed during the fight over school desegregation in the 1950s to feature the Confederate emblem--white activists vow to protest if the flag is taken down.

“I think that our black friends--and I have many black friends--just refuse to accept the fact that it’s a part of history,” said Angie Barker, a white retired schoolteacher who lives in Carrollton, Ga., 50 miles from Atlanta, near the Alabama border. “It was not right what happened, but it wasn’t the fault of the whites who are here now,” she said of slavery. “If this was part of history, I don’t see any reason not to acknowledge it.”

While the clash over Southern symbolism threatens to revive old controversies, in other parts of the South the Olympics have sparked reappraisal of old racial views and deep reflection on the meaning of Southern hospitality.

Hattisburg, Miss., was the training site for Olympic teams from two African countries, Kenya and Malawi. Sixty-eight black Africans were accepted into the homes and hearts of white Mississippians who ordinarily do not mingle much with people of other races.

Afterward, the Mississippians began to ask themselves why it was easier to interact socially with foreigners than with people who live just on the other side of town.

“There still is a voluntary separation” of the races, acknowledged Rick Taylor, director of the city’s convention and visitor’s bureau. “There are festivals that are pretty much African American, and there are some large city festivals where everybody is there, and there are events that are largely white-oriented in the people who respond. I think this gave people an opportunity to say, ‘Wait a minute. Why is that?’ ”

Not since Union forces burned Atlanta during the Civil War have locals been so worked up over somebody coming this way with a torch. Only now, the feelings of fear and dread many here have is combined with anticipation and excitement--all of it shared by people as far away as Louisiana and Virginia.

Even rural Georgians--who ordinarily look on Atlanta as a heathen Northern city plopped down in their midst--view the Olympics as their time in the sun.

“It’s occurring in Atlanta,” Taylor said, “but it’s the South’s Olympics.”

Those outside Atlanta share the city’s anxiety. If something goes wrong, many feel it will reflect badly on the region. “I want everything to go exactly right,” Barker said. “I want everybody to have a good experience because this is a good part of the country.”

“Southerners have got a different attitude than anybody in the whole, wide world,” said Ray Cantrell, director of the Henderville, N.C., Chamber of Commerce. “We stick together and pull for one another.” Then he added: “I hope Atlanta doesn’t screw it up.”

Visitors to Atlanta looking for remnants of the antebellum South will be disappointed. Perhaps because it was burned to the ground--or perhaps because many consider the past painful--Atlanta is a forward-looking city with little regard for history.

A few years ago, an effort was begun to rehabilitate the apartment building where Margaret Mitchell wrote her Civil War classic “Gone With the Wind” and turn it into a tourist attraction. Mitchell wanted no monuments and referred to her home as “the dump,” a nickname that endures. But the project was begun, along with other unrelated plans for “Gone With the Wind” museums and a Tara theme park.

An arsonist torched the home in 1994. Preservationists persuaded Daimler-Benz, the German automobile manufacturer, to donate $4.5 million to begin the job anew. Then, in May, arsonists struck again. Tourists now will have to make do with a visitors’ center next to the building.

Leaders of organizations such as the Sons of Confederate War Veterans lament attacks on the symbols of the Old South and are saddened that it is difficult to find the state flag flying anywhere downtown these days.

After civil rights groups began pressing to change the flag, Gov. Zell Miller took up the cause in 1992. The legislature refused to change the flag, but by the time the fight was over, city and county government offices and most downtown hotels and businesses had stopped flying it.

Even so, a quarterly survey of Georgians conducted by Georgia State University shows that support for changing the flag has remained at 35% or lower, with only 50% to 60% of African Americans supporting a change.

Coleman, the anti-flag activist, blames the lack of African American support on the many blacks who do not know the history of the symbol and who accept the flag as part of their heritage.

Given the difficulty of resolving the continuing conflict, Olympic organizers must walk a fine line in today’s ceremonies. Details are being kept secret. But Billy Payne, president of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games, has revealed that the ceremonies will seek to celebrate the New South, while tipping a hat to the old traditions.

He and Andrew Young, the former mayor and civil rights activist who co-chairs the local Olympic committee, relied on King’s dream of a racially harmonious South in their appeals to the International Olympic Committee to have the Games staged here.

At a recent dedication of a new visitors center at the King historic site--which includes the civil rights leader’s crypt and birth home--Mayor Bill Campbell acknowledged King’s importance in the city’s winning of the Games.

“Without Dr. King’s vision, without his courage, without his legacy, we could not have brought the Games to the city of Atlanta,” he said.

That’s why the display of the flag during the event is particularly galling to Coleman.

“The black leaders should’ve gotten behind it and demanded that the flag be changed,” he said the other day from his perch on Peachtree Street, where he stands daily to collect donations for his legal fight. “In the home of Dr. King, it’s important that that flag be taken down.”