This past week has brought me to a more appreciative sense of my South Carolinian-ness, if that's even a word. As you are no doubt aware, we had the unspeakable crime of murder visited upon our state on June 17, in the Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston. The crime was racially motivated, and the killer took photos of himself with various racial totems (including the American flag, which last time I checked did in fact fly over a nation where the distance between "all men are created equal" and the reality has been closing over the last century or so, but is nowhere near closed). What took up the media's attention, rightly or wrongly, was the fact that our state capital grounds hosted a Confederate battle flag for well over fifty years, first over the dome itself (at the bottom, below the American and state flags) and then at a "memorial for Confederate dead" when a compromise was reached over the flag's place on state grounds in the early part of this century.
That flag is down now, for good, and I couldn't be happier.
I grew up in the South, and of course I was taught that the South "had just cause" to demand its separation from the United States, that it was basically a follow-up to the 13 Colonies breaking ties with England. That the war hadn't been fought over slavery but "state's rights." I was brought up to believe this, at least in school. My mother encouraged my early reading, and my early love of history, and she never looked at the books I brought home from the library to say "oh, that's not something you should be reading" (not that I was bringing home issues of Playboy or anything: this is a public library in the South we're talking about), but my point is that she never once told me that I couldn't read something, and I read a lot (or started a lot of books, sometimes giving up after a few pages because, as a kid, I probably would've been happier with books with pictures of talking animals or whatever).
I educated myself about the war, read as much about it as I could, and I came to the conclusion that the war was fought over one thing: slavery.
I know that a lot of people defending the flag over the past month have argued otherwise, but the idea that the Confederate flag represents anything but a government bent on preserving servitude of its black inhabitants (they weren't considered "citizens" by any stretch) is patently false and delusional. Do I think every single Confederate soldier was a racist slave-owner or sympathetic to the idea that blacks were inferior and thus needed to be kept in chains? No, I do not. I think that the average infantry soldier (usually the poorest of the poor, and unable to afford slaves anyway) probably fought more because their homes were being invaded. I think that you can serve with valor and heroism for a cause which does not merit it. The Southern soldiers, the ones who displayed courage and bravery, did so in the service of a cause which was far, far beneath them. Those who fought for the preservation of slavery (including the leading politicians of the Confederacy, and many of her generals) deserved to lose the war in 1865.
Good thing I didn't give out my personal address on this thing, or else there'd be a mob of Confederate flag-waving activists on my lawn when I get home.
The fact is, the South was wrong to break away from the United States, because it did so in the service of a cause which didn't seek to honor the foundations of liberty but because it sought to deny them, to a sizable portion of its population (ironically, had the South tapped into the manpower of blacks in the region earlier as soldiers in the army, they could very well have done better militarily once the tide turned at Gettysburg. And no, the fact that the Confederacy finally grudgingly began to enlist companies of black soldiers does not mean that the racism and hatred which fueled their desire to do anything but arm slaves is suddenly and magically washed away). Whatever the Confederate flag meant before the end of the war (and it meant slavery), it came to mean far worse when taken up as a banner by the Klan and other terrorist organizations in the immediate aftermath of the war and the implementation of Reconstruction.
When the flag went up our state house flag pole in the early Sixties, it wasn't to honor the Confederate dead. It was a giant middle finger (and a threat) to the efforts of Civil Rights leaders to enact change in the South. That we're still arguing this so long after the last shots of the war were fired, and I see people that I know and like (and even some relatives) online say that it's "heritage, not hate," is heartbreaking to me. I don't expect anyone reading this to have their minds or hearts changed just because I dropped some knowledge about the Confederacy and the Civil War. But I got to hope for it.
So seeing the flag taken down, finally, on Friday morning, it was a great day to be an American, and a South Carolinian. All these people flying Rebel flags from their trucks, who went to the trouble to spend money on such things, they don't have a rallying point on the State House grounds anymore. In fact, the song "Rednecks" by Randy Newman comes to mind. It's a song written from the point-of-view of a Southern racist in the Seventies, and as such it uses a certain word that white people really shouldn't say anymore (and indeed, Newman saying it in character might not assuage casual listeners who might hear it out of context), but it's a beautiful song in terms of capturing not just the mindset of the South but also of the North (where racism, as it turns out, is not a foreign concept). But for a long time, deservedly so, the South and white Southerners have been known as the nation's preeminent racists. Taking down the flag doesn't automatically mean that racism is over in SC, but it signals that maybe we can start trying to do better, to pay back what we owe. I do think there's a place for the flag, but that place is in a museum, where a respectful treatment of the past (in all its unpleasant aspects) can take place. All these people flying the flag now, they're signs of the past, not of the future. To quote Newman, they don't know their ass from a hole in the ground. And now their pathetic symbol of pride is gone from the grounds of the State House.
Good riddance to old rubbish.
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