Here’s where I get called a liberal, a Yankee, and usually some other unflattering comments, which usually show off the ignorance of the commenter.
So this kid from a little Podunk town in North Carolina attends college at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He buys two confederate flags at a Virginia gift shop. He displays one in his window and then says that he didn’t think it would be a problem? In the essence of fairness, here is his argument.
The flag’s owner says it’s about pride.
People don’t get upset about the Rebel flag in King, N.C., he says.
The town of about 7,000 people, and “about 97 percent white,” Montgomery says, are used to seeing it hanging in front of neighbors’ houses.
The flag comes second – after the American flag, before the state flag – in the town’s annual parade.
To Montgomery, the flag means rolling hills and lush Carolina valleys. It means King, where he knows everyone and everyone knows him.
It’s collard greens, grits with butter and a friendly wave from a front porch as you drive by, he says.
It’s the South he knows and loves.
“When I look at it, I think of home.”
First off, I think flying the Confederate flag before the state flag of North Carolina is doing a great disservice to North Carolina. Basically, what you’re saying is that a defunct, anti-abolitionist, segregationist and some would even say a seditious country is better than what North Carolina is today.
I may just be a “Yankee transplant” but I love North Carolina, and I’m damn proud to make it my home. And it’s all these rebel flag waving hicks that make it look bad to the rest of the country. And if you want to bring something with you that reminds of you of home, bring a banner from Duke or N.C. State or God forbid…Chapel Hill.
Now the opposing opinion, which I happen to agree with.
The “Southern Cross” rose to post-Civil War prominence around the turn of the 20th century, at the same time many Reconstruction-era reforms were being eroded by Southern state governments, he says.
It rose again during the 1960s, when those opposing the Civil Rights movement used it as a symbol of defiance against the federally mandated integration of schools.
The Strom Thurmond-led Dixiecrat party adopted it when it broke from the Democrats during the early stages of the Civil Rights struggle.
So have countless white supremacy groups, including the Ku Klux Klan.
“As a historian, I find it difficult to untangle the symbol from racial inequality,” Jones says. “To say this flag isn’t linked to slavery – That’s a historically inaccurate statement if we’re honest about it.”
And let’s not leave out that the Confederacy lost. Now, this kid has every Constitutional right to display the flag if he so chooses. However, common-sense dictates that if you do choose to display the flag, there is going to be controversy.
Personally, I think the south has every right to be proud. I love the south. I extol its virtues on almost a daily basis. What they should not be proud of is the Confederacy. If you want to have a universally recognized flag of southern pride, then maybe y’all should get together and design a new one. Because the old one is nothing to be proud of.
