Transforming a Flag--and Its Meaning

‘When I join any movement,” the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in 1861, “I must have a country or a hope of a country under me--a government around me--and some flag of a Northern or Southern nation floating over me.”

At that early stage of the Civil War, it was unclear whether the Stars and Stripes, standing as it did for a country still committed to slavery, would be any more inspiring to Douglass than the flag of the new Confederacy. Until a war for the Union became a war for liberation, African Americans lacked what white citizens could take for granted: a flag to celebrate, a flag to bleed for, a flag that could convey and encapsulate emotionally satisfying displays of patriotic identity and pride.

Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, there is considerably less confusion about the banner of preference for the descendants of slaves. This was made clear earlier this month in Columbia, S.C., when more than 40,000 marchers, the majority of whom were black, gathered to protest the Confederate flag flying atop the state Capitol. The NAACP, well aware that this flag was hoisted in 1962, in large part to defy civil-rights legislation, has declared a boycott of the state, to remain in effect until the emblem is removed. Though there have been bitter fights within South Carolina on this issue for several years, recent events have now made the topic a matter for national debate, most notably among Republican presidential contenders.

Neo-Confederates insist, as did Douglass in 1861, that if “their” sacred symbol conjures up memories of slavery, then the U.S. flag, with its equally disreputable past, should be objectionable as well. This overlooks a central point often missed in these never-ending flag controversies: the ability of symbols to change their meanings with the circumstances. African Americans have known how this works. When the Columbia marchers waved the Stars and Stripes, they did so confident that this emblem had been redeemed of earlier associations at least twice: first by federal troops during the Civil War and then by federal courts and marshals during the civil-rights movement a full century later.

Yet, even with this flag’s transformation during these two pivotal moments, the question remains whether African Americans are fully satisfied with the Star-Spangled Banner. Can the unifying emblem of the United States measure up to the needs of a group whose “double consciousness” has become a defining aspect of its experience? Efforts to adopt other flags in recent years demonstrate that at least some black leaders have felt a need for something more.

Between 1968 and 1972, organizers in Newark, N.J., mounted an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to popularize a “Black American Heritage Flag,” featuring a gold sword on a red and black background. Its designers, who write about this in the book “The Rallying Point,” wanted black Americans to have a standard comparable to, say, the “ethnic” flags of immigrant groups from Ireland, Italy and Poland.

More recently, two organizations in Charleston, S.C., have taken a postmodern approach of presenting recognizable patterns in the vibrant reds, greens and blacks of the African liberation movement. The “African American Flag” superimposes these colors, along with blues and golds, on the Star-Spangled Banner itself, creating a new lexicon of what each of the stars and stripes represents. The result is an emblem transformed once more, this time by the actions of African Americans themselves rather than by a historically fickle national government.

An even more subversive banner has been marketed for the past three years as the distinctive logo of the Charleston company NuSouth Apparel. This company appropriated the recognizable Confederate flag with a bold change of traditional colors to red, green and black, and placed the transposed icon on its sweaters, shirts, ties and caps. This daring move received a surprisingly welcome reception among African Americans at the Million Man March and has since been written about in GQ and Time.

This retooled rebel flag forces a rethinking of the supposed duality in the South Carolina debate. The gesture is not merely ironic, but a self-conscious attempt to invoke “African American heritage” by recognizing ties to the American South, a region that is the closest thing to a “black homeland” on this side of the Atlantic. In doing so, the NuSouth entrepreneurs have attempted to resolve the false choice of whether the Confederate flag is a symbol for heritage and sacrifice, as its white supporters claim, or a symbol for slavery and oppression, as its detractors argue. Their marketing appeal relies on the icon’s ability to conjure up both, with the banner’s power as a historic relic and a regional signifier showing that even the most notorious emblem can achieve redemption--given the right moment and the proper redeemers.

This effort at symbolic appropriation comes at an important time. More than half of the nation’s African Americans live in the Southeastern states and, after a century of shrinking, this percentage is now on the rise. Passively accepting exclusion from the Southern past greatly diminishes the historic dimension of African American identity and, given current demographic trends, also compromises the richness of the community’s future. NuSouth has helped make clear the undeniable, albeit painful, relationship that black Southerners have with the same past and with the same geography that neo-Confederates apparently desire as their own exclusive preserve. They resolve to claim both blackness and Southernness by radically transforming, rather than removing, a racially polarizing expression of regional pride.

Douglass himself understood that African Americans had local as well as national claims that were likely to be compromised, if not completely stolen, without a concerted effort to secure them. “What class of people can show a better title to the land on which they live than the colored people of the South?” he asked, late in 1862. Having himself embraced the Stars and Stripes by this point, he still considered it would be “a shame and a crime little inferior in enormity to slavery itself” for white Americans to deny slaves this hard-fought regional inheritance. By shedding blood and tears, while others waved flags, black slaves had transformed the South for more than two centuries, producing “whatever has made it a goodly land to dwell in.”

Yet, the sacrifices of African Americans have continued for another 140 years. This history explains why an unredeemed rebel flag flying over South Carolina’s statehouse can serve no good purpose.