Jacobs: Confederate flag issue brings back bad memories for ACC’s first black athletes

Billy Jones is disappointed, but not surprised. He’s disappointed it took until now for use of the Confederate battle flag to fall into broad disfavor in this country. He is not surprised, however, that the flag has been sanctioned in areas of public life from official settings to sporting venues for the half-century since he became the first black basketball player in the ACC.

“It’s very disappointing we’re still kicking this around, very disappointing,” Jones says of debate over the flag with its 13-starred blue “X” on a red field. “It’s a sign of the whole time when one group was in control, one group was oppressed, and to me it’s like holding on to that. That was just part of that world. I get it, but we’re not in the ’60s anymore. We’re just not there anymore.”

Jones quietly entered the ACC as a Maryland Terrapin in an era before intensive media coverage of sports and prior to the existence of common understandings for intelligent discussions of race.

During the 1965-66 season, when Jones took the court for the Maryland varsity, the league was a quaint assemblage covering four states and eight schools between College Park, Md., and Columbia, S.C. Political correctness in many places the Terps traveled was not defined by respect for differences, but rather by minorities “knowing their place” at the bottom of the social pecking order.

Overt segregation was dying a slow death, but not without stiff resistance. Jones routinely encountered racial snubs and slurs, punctuated by prominent displays of the Confederate flag. The image appeared on T-shirts, on bumper stickers affixed to cars and trucks. Fraternities, including at Maryland, hung the battle flag from chapter house windows. “It was very obvious,” Jones says of the unwelcoming message the flag conveyed.

One pioneering African-American athlete, Duke’s Ernie Jackson, a native of Columbia, recalled his discomfort relying on teammates who displayed the Confederate flag outside their dorms. The sight made it “extremely difficult to have to go to war with those guys and play with them from a teammate perspective,” said Jackson, a consensus All-American and the ACC football’s first black Player of the Year in 1971.

Jones had his own sour experience on a visit to Duke, when the snack bar operator at Durham’s train station refused to serve him with his teammates. In response, coach Bud Millikan’s Maryland contingent walked away.

When possible, Jones and classmate Pete Johnson kept such episodes to themselves. The slights were so numerous they might appear to be “crybabies” if they kept telling Millikan, Jones says.

The apparent lack of friction reinforced a narrative of smoothly achieved integration. The backstory was more complicated throughout the ACC, and not only for individual players. The 1963 court-ordered admission of a black student at Clemson was accomplished without violence. But within weeks of the enrollment of Harvey Gantt, later the mayor of Charlotte, South Carolina lawmakers made an unmistakeably defiant declaration by voting to place the Confederate battle flag atop the State House in Columbia.

Their disdain for federal mandates to promote racial equality was in keeping with the spirit of an S.C. Supreme Court ruling only six years earlier, which found it inherently libelous, and a basis upon which to sue for damages, to call a white person a “Negro.”

Soon after gaining admittance, the handful of African-American students at Clemson, as elsewhere around the South, strongly objected to school functions featuring renditions of “Dixie” and displays of the battle flag as vestiges of a slave-era past. But those divisive symbols were celebrated then, as now, by many whites as links to a proud past.

So, when Clemson’s cheerleaders ran onto the field before an October 1969 football game at Death Valley carrying a huge American flag as a substitute for the customary Confederate version, the crowd booed and jeered.

The next day, citing ongoing harassment – including a blackface Homecoming skit and cars driven slowly across campus shadowing African-American students – some 60 black undergrads protested by leaving Clemson en masse, if merely overnight.

“It was not only the flag, but the activities behind the flag that bothered us,” says Craig Mobley, who in 1971 became the first black varsity basketball player at Clemson. “We knew it meant intimidation. That was it. That was just the bottom line. The flag itself is neutral. It’s the hands of the people that use it that make a difference.”

The flag’s current presence on the grounds of the South Carolina capitol building is defended by boosters as a tribute to the sacrifices endured by state residents during the Civil War. But that portrayal willfully distorts the flag’s modern provenance and ignores the silence of traditionalists when that symbol of Confederate pride was adapted for less savory purposes.

The battle flag was embraced by groups such as the Dixiecrats, a breakaway strain of white supremacist Democrats led in 1948 by South Carolina’s then-Gov. Strom Thurmond. And of course the flag is routinely flaunted by the Ku Klux Klan, long classified as a terrorist organization.

“That’s what the KKK had,” says Al Heartley, the first African-American basketball player at N.C. State in the late 1960s. Heartley played high school ball in Smithfield, a town that long sported a billboard on its outskirts proclaiming, “Welcome to KKK Country.” Adds Heartley: “The KKK and the Confederate flag were together. Yeah, they would try to intimidate black folks.”

When segregationist George Wallace became Alabama’s governor in 1963, he ordered Confederate battle flag replicas affixed to the helmets of state troopers. Two years later, just as Jones and classmate Pete Johnson finished their barrier-breaking freshman season at Maryland, that emblem was prominently displayed by troopers during a savage attack on voting-rights marchers at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala.

“As we all have to acknowledge, the flag has always represented more than just ancestral pride,” President Barack Obama said last month while eulogizing pastor and state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, a shooting victim at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church. “For a long time we were blind to the pain that the Confederate flag stirred in too many of our citizens.”

Certainly those who led the way from a divided society to a commingled one through sports are not blind to the darker aspects of what the battle flag represents. “The flag is just a symbol,” says Jones, whose race still attracts security personnel when he shops in high-end stores. “It’s the bigotry, the right of entitlement, the sense of superiority that’s the issue.”

Heartley foresees Confederate battle flags increasingly relegated to museums. Beyond that, he is more resigned than hopeful. “When things happen, unfortunately like the nine folks killed in Charleston, we’ll have a lot of discussion about it and we’ll go back and forth. My thought is, it’ll be like the gun (control) situation – we’ll talk about guns, but eventually we won’t do much.”

Mobley, a native of Chester, S.C., believes younger generations – already exposed to more ethnic and cultural diversity than their predecessors – will benefit from discussions of America’s racially fraught past. Jones sees a chance to promote change, declaring, “I honestly believe that, the more we understand the past, the better we’re prepared for the future.”

This story was originally published July 5, 2015 at 10:26 PM with the headline "Jacobs: Confederate flag issue brings back bad memories for ACC’s first black athletes."