Will Americans one day look back and find that our thoughts, either for or against, the Confederate flag were as similar as the Southerners (and Northerners alike) ensnared in war. Perhaps we have molded the issue into something it wasn’t. Perhaps we had our own agenda. Was it really the flag that we were so concerned about? Or was it that we simply like to try and force our political views on one another. I believe it is the latter of the two. Regardless of the fact, the Confederate flag controversy will be a battle that we will fight for a long time to come.
Which is worse, the Confederate flag, or the political agendas being forced on Americans by those who oppose the flag? The Civil War ended on April 9th 1865. But here in modern day America, a new battle is raging, the battle between the true meaning of the Confederate flag, and the political agendas of those who want to take a piece of heritage away from the south. I am not saying that the Confederate flag has not been used to represent some despicable things through out its history. But it is not the flag’s fault; man, is the person responsible for turning this inanimate object into a symbol of hate. Throughout the ages, groups such as the K.K.K, Skin Heads, and other White power groups have carried the Confederate flag in marches and demonstrations. Government officials have even used the Confederate flag unjustly, as Denmark Groover did in the early part of the twentieth century, in his defiant stand against integration. Because these people decided to use the Confederate flag to represent hate, other groups have decided that the Confederate flag could stand for nothing else but hate, and have called for the removal of the Confederate flag in all southern states.
The key modern day opponent of the Confederate flag is the NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.) The NAACP is the oldest, largest and strongest civil rights organization in the United States. The principal objective of the NAACP is to ensure the political, educational, social and economic equality of minority groups. The NAACP is committed to non-violence and relies upon the press, the petition, the ballot and the courts, even in the face of overt and violent racial hostility.
The NAACP argues that the Confederate States of America came into being by way of secession from and war against the United States of America, out of a desire to defend the right of individual states to maintain an economic system based on slave labor, and the Confederate Battle Flag was raised in these States for the supposed celebration of the Centennial of the War Between the States and as an unspoken symbol of resistance to the battle for civil rights and equality in the early 1960’s. They also state that the Confederate Battle Flag has been embraced as the primary symbol for the numerous modern-day groups advocating white supremacy, and whereas, the placement of the Confederate Battle Flag at any State House with the flag of the United States of America, implies sovereignty and allegiance to a non-existent nation, and makes a statement of public policy that continues to be an insult to the sensibilities and dignity of a majority of African Americans in the state in which the Confederate flag still flies.
The Confederate flag, has suffered for many years from this type of false propaganda heaped upon it by the NAACP and other Civil Rights organizations. For example the first lie or misconception is, that the War Between the States; was fought over slavery, with the North fighting to free Southern slaves and the South fighting to keep their slaves. This of course, is not true. First of all, all thirteen original states which succeeded from England in 1776, owned slaves. During the War Between the States, many people in the North also owned slaves, but refused to free their slaves until after the War. People in Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, Missouri, West Virginia, and even Washington, D.C., owned slaves; these states never succeeded and were under the control of the United States throughout the course of the entire War. However, they were not required to free their slaves by the U.S. government. The U.S. Congress in 1862 even refused to pass a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery, when the only Senators and Representatives in Congress were from the North (all Southerners had left Congress to form their own nation). How could the North be fighting the War to free Southern slaves when they would not free their own?
The second misconception is that the Confederate flag is the symbol of the K.K.K. The Confederate battle flag has no more to do with the Ku Klux Klan than the Christian cross, which the Klan carries and burns, or the flag of the United States, that the Klan says the Pledge of Allegiance to, yet the NAACP constantly tries to connect the Confederate flag to the Klan in their propaganda. However, the NAACP never ask preachers if they are Klan members, because they wear a cross around their necks, or link the American Legion to the Klan because they carry the U.S. flag.
The last misconception that the NAACP would have us to believe is that, the Confederate flag continues to be an insult to the sensibilities and dignity of a majority of African Americans in the state in which the Confederate flag still flies. Fortunately, most people have not been deceived by such political propaganda, as is evidenced in a recent Louis Harris poll which shows that 92% of the Southern people, of all races, are not offended by the Confederate flag, and that 68% of Blacks nationwide are not offended.
It is time to set the record straight, to refute the myths and false propaganda, of the NAACP and regain our southern heritage. To honor our Confederate ancestors by flying the Confederate flag in memory and honor of our Confederate veterans who willingly shed their blood fighting for something they believed in.
The Civil War ended on April 9th 1865. But here in modern day America, a new battle is raging. Unlike the Civil War, this battle is not fought, fist to fist, or gun to gun, nor does this battle involve blood shed. This battle is fought in the courtroom, and if lost, could result in the loss of our Southern Heritage. For several years now the people of the south have encountered many arguments against the Confederate Flag and why it should be torn down, and replaced with a flag that doesn’t even come close to representing what Southern Heritage is all about. Some of these arguments border on absurd and others appear, on the surface, to have merit, at least to those who ponder them. In this essay, I will be presenting some of the most common arguments given for removing, the Confederate Flag, and immediately following each argument; I will present a logical response that successfully refutes the argument, demonstrating why the Confederate Flag should be allowed to wave freely in Georgia.
The first argument is: "Since the Ku Klux Klan flies the Confederate flag, it has become a symbol of hatred, racism and intolerance. We cannot let our state (or school or whatever) project an image of racism by flying a Confederate battle flag or something that contains the Confederate battle flag." My answer to this statement is simply this: First, many in the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) do not fly the Confederate battle flag. In fact, only a small number actually use a Confederate flag. However, we are told that KKK bylaws require the U.S. flag and the Christian flag to be present at every event. Most people are not aware that the largest KKK membership is in the North and it has been that way since the early 1900s. Mr. Boyd Lewis, a Klan expert who spoke at DeKalb College in Atlanta, states that at the height of Klan power, "Indiana had the largest Klan population with over 2 million members between 1915-1916" Most KKK groups prefer to use a U.S. flag or a Christian flag, yet oddly enough, no one is calling for the permanent censorship of those symbols!
Americans have been programmed, by the liberal media, into believing that the KKK is only a "Southern Thing" and that only Southern symbols must pay for the Klan's transgressions. A free-lance photographer with the Atlanta Journal Constitution once related with frustration at how the newspapers never buy or use his photographs if they show the Klan carrying a U.S. flag. "They only want to use the photographs that show a Confederate flag." Based on the magnitude of media bias that would have us believe the Confederate flag and the Klan go hand-in-hand, although incorrect, it is understandable why people have the perceptions they do. However, those perceptions are based on false information, and it is the perception that must be changed, not the symbol that has been victimized by the perception.
Second, the use of a symbol by a person or group does not convey the characteristics of that person or group to that symbol. For example, Malcolm X and the nation of Islam were indisputably, the black equivalent of David Duke and the Klan. Both lived and preached racial hatred. Both claimed to have found religion and converted. If the Confederate flag symbolizes the Klan's white racism against blacks, then we must interpret the "X" of Malcolm X, emblazoned on the clothes of many black consumers, as being symbolic of Malcolm X's black racism against whites. Intolerance of one symbol insures the intolerance of the other.
The second argument is: “The Confederate flag should not be honored because it is a cruel reminder of the by-gone era of slavery and slave-trade." Again my reply to this is: Slavery was a legal institution in this country for over 200 years. Africans were brought here by northern slave traders to be used in northern industry, long before the antebellum South or the Confederacy ever existed. The first American colony to legalize slavery was Massachusetts in 1641, only 17 years after the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. "The slave trade became very profitable to the shipping colonies and Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut and New Hampshire had many ships in the triangular trade," "The moral argument against slavery arose early in the New England shipping colonies but it could not withstand the profits of the trade and soon died out."
Thomas Jefferson condemned the slave trade in the original draft of the Declaration of Independence, but the New England slave traders lobbied to have the clause stricken. In a short eleven year period form 1755 to 1766, no fewer than 23,000 slaves landed in Massachusetts. By 1787, Rhode Island had taken first place in the slave trade to be unseated later by New York. Before long, millions of slaves would be brought to America by way of 'northern' slave ships. After all, there were no Southern slave ships involved in the triangular slave, it was simply too cruel.
William P. Cheshire, the senior editorial columnist for the Arizona Republic recently noted, the New England Yankee who brought slaves to America, "were interested in getting money, not in helping their cargo make a fresh start in the New World." He adds that northern slave ownership "isn't widely known - American textbooks tend to be printed in Boston, not Atlanta - but early New Englanders not only sold blacks to Southern planters but also kept slaves for themselves as well as enslaving the local Indian population."
Slavery did not appear in the Deep South until northern settlers began to migrate south, bringing with them their slaves. It was soon discovered that while slaves were not suited to the harsh climate and working conditions of the north, they were ideal sources of cheap labor for the newly flourishing economy of the agricultural South. Of the 9.5 million slaves brought to the Western Hemisphere from 1500 - 1870, less than 6% were brought to the United States. This means that our Hispanic, British and French neighbors to the south owned over 94% of the slaves brought to the New World. In the South, less than 7% of the total population ever owned a slave. In other words, over 93% of Southerners did not own any slaves.
Attempts to outlaw the slave trade in the north only increased the profits of smuggling. In 1858, only two years prior to the birth of the Confederacy, Stephen Douglas noted that over 15,000 slaves had been smuggled into New York alone, with over 85 vessels sailing from New York in 1859 to smuggle even more slaves. Perhaps it was their own guilt that drove the abolitionists of the day to point an accusing finger at the South, while closing their eyes to the slavery and the slave trade taking place in their own back yards.
For more than 200 years, northern slave traders made enormous profits that furnished the capitol for future investments into mainstream industries. Who is more responsible for slavery in America, the Southern plantation owner who fed and clothed his slaves, or the New England "Yankee" slave trader who brought the slaves here in the first place?
From 1641, when Massachusetts first legalized slavery, until 1865, when the Confederate struggle for independence ended, slavery was a legal institution in America that lasted over 224 years. The Confederate battle flag flew for 4 of those 224 years, but the U.S. flag and its colonial predecessors flew over legalized slavery for ALL of those 224 years. It was the U.S. flag that the slave first saw, and it was the U.S. flag that flew on the mast of New England slave ships as they brought their human cargo to this country. It is clear, that those who attack the Confederate flag as a reminder of slavery are overlooking the most guilty and hateful of all reminders of American slavery, the U.S. flag.
The last and most absurd argument of them all is: "What's the big deal? It's only a flag. Besides, you have all of those monuments, memorials, markers, etc. to remind you of the Confederacy - Can't we find a compromise?" And my answer to that is: The issue of whether to fly the Confederate battle flag is only the "tip of the iceberg". We are now seeing children abused in schools for wearing clothing with a portrait of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson or a likeness of a Confederate symbol. We have seen numerous efforts by various groups to change street names, remove Confederate monuments, censor the playing of Dixie (a song written by a Northerner) and otherwise purge our society of visible remembrances of Southern Heritage. Where is the compromise in that? A simple test for the worthiness of any offer to compromise is to determine the resulting visibility of the Confederate symbol being challenged. After all, a true compromise is where both sides win something or both sides lose something. If one side wins and the other loses, that, by definition, is not a compromise but a defeat. Any solution that reduces the value, validity or visibility of a Confederate symbol is not a compromise and therefore unacceptable.
As you can see both sides in the conflict have their own opinions on what should be done in regards to the Confederate Flag. I myself know which side I stand on. And that is the side to keep heritage alive, whether it be Southern Heritage or American Heritage. Be proud of your roots, be proud of your heritage, and most importantly be proud to live in a country that allows us to all have our own opinion. In other words thank God for allowing you to be free.
