Using Confederate flags as a cover for and expression of racism

In an article published in 2001, the late UNC Professor Louis D. Rubin, one of the nation’s most eminent scholars on Southern history and literature, wrote these words concerning the Confederate battle flag atop the Capitol of his native South Carolina: “The flag had not been placed there by those who had fought for it, but instead a century later to serve as a conscious rallying symbol of white opposition to the Supreme Court’s 1954 ruling that racial segregation in school was unconstitutional.”

Close to 15 years later, the South Carolina legislature is debating whether to take down the flag from a monument on the state House grounds, where it was moved reluctantly from the Capitol’s dome in 2000. Rubin’s assessment of why the flag still flies in public places, not only in South Carolina but in many other Southern states, should be all that is needed to settle this issue.

Beginning with the flag’s resurrection in South Carolina in 1962 and continuing today, flying this flag does only one thing: It lends legitimacy to the actions of people whose goal is the oppression of African-American citizens. That meaning supersedes whatever the flag might have meant when young white Southern men fell into formation behind it on battlefields north and south between 1861 and 1865.

As Rubin also said, it doesn’t justify anything to argue that, because so many Southern soldiers owned no slaves, the flag did not and does not glorify slave-owning or bigotry. “Those who did own (slaves) controlled the politics in the State, and the vote to secede in 1861 was an early example of what was for generations the guiding maxim of Southern politics, that is, that if you can make a sufficiently lurid appeal to people’s racial prejudices, you can always get them to vote against their own economic and social interests.”

Isn’t that still tragically true today?

The slayings at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Rubin’s own beloved birthplace of Charleston would have grieved him deeply. What would anger him even more is the fact that the suspect had been reading literature written by a white supremacist whose contributions to the campaigns of several recent political candidates were accepted without murmur. Dylann Roof sat in a Bible study group with those he is charged with mercilessly slaughtering. There can be no question that the Confederate flag was for him a shield and a rallying cry for racism so repulsive that it is hard to see how anyone can look at this degraded symbol now without shame.

Some who condemn today’s Confederate flag lovers say that they are “on the wrong side of history.” What seems truer when we listen to what these defenders say they think the flag means is that they quite simply don’t know history. Either that, or they know it all too well, and they are using this piece of cloth just as the Charleston shooter did – and just as the men who raised the flag over the South Carolina Capitol in 1962 did: as both a cover for and an expression of racist hatred.

To adapt another Southern scholar-poet’s (Allen Tate’s) words, What can we say, we who do have our knowledge of history “carried to the heart”? In the name of decency, and to honor the memory of all who have died because of racist hatred in our nation, the answer can only be, Bring it down.

This story was originally published July 7, 2015 at 5:13 PM with the headline "Using Confederate flags as a cover for and expression of racism."