Julianne Malveaux Commentary
CONFEDERATE FLAGS AND CONFEDERATE MINDSETS
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX
If the Confederate flag comes down from the Capitol Dome in Columbia, South Carolina, will the NAACP call off its boycott of state tourism? No, say NAACP leaders, who feel the flag has no place in that state's public life. They'd like to see the flag placed in a glass case in a historical Confederate Relic room and leave it at that. They are opposed by good ol' boys who want the flag to maintain a place of honor. Meanwhile, South Carolina Governor Jim Hodges has proposed a compromise. Take the flag off the dome, let it fly in front of the Wade Hampton statue (which is a tribute to a confederate solider) south of the Capital, and call it a day.
At the surface, this compromise seems reasonable. Scratch the surface and it turns out that Governor Hodges offers his Solomonic compromise along with legislation to protect Confederate statues, streets, and other tributes throughout the state. Why should the Confederacy be protected? Why should one aspect of South Carolina's history, a rather disgraceful aspect at that, be elevated when so many other aspects are hidden? And why should African Americans, one-third of the population of South Carolina, chafe under the flag of a Confederacy that was formed to oppress and exploit them?
This question has become a national issue, partly because the South Carolina Republican primary takes place a scant month after 50,000 people gathered in that state's capitol for a march and rally to remove the Confederate flag. Every Presidential candidate has been pulled into the fray, though it is clear that they'd prefer to ignore questions about the meaning of the South Carolina State flag. George W. Bush has said that it's none of our business. The decision about the Confederate flag, according to him, ought to be left to the people of South Carolina. Then, after New Hampshire, he rushed to Bob Jones University, where interracial dating is banned, making his views on race all too clear. Candidate John McCain, ordinarily feisty and decisive, managed to both condemn the flag as a symbol of racism and embrace it as part of someone's ancestral heritage. Vice-President Gore says he abhors the flag, but cannot support a boycott of any state in the country. Two weeks before the Republican primary, Senator Bill Bradley gave a rousing speech at Benedict College, one of the state's largest historically black colleges and universities.
Many black South Carolinians aren't buying the Governor's proposal. "If the flag is an insult to me flying off the dome, it's also an insult when it is brought down to ground level and flies in my face," said David Swinton, Benedict College's President and a member of the coalition that organized the January 17 march and rally. The NAACP says the flag should be placed in a museum, in a glass case, as a relic of the past. I say burn it, use it for landfill, dusting rags, or worse. I say that with no disrespect to anyone's ancestors, but with the clear sense that the confederate flag is an insult, a slap in the face, toward me and mine.
One of the organizing precepts of the Confederacy was the "inferiority of the Negro race". State's rights meant that some states could keep slaves despite a Constitution that declared all men equal and increasing public sentiment that slavery should be abolished. And the Confederate flag didn't fly over the South Carolina capitol dome until 1962. Mythology has it that the flag was hoisted to commemorate the 100th centennial of the Confederacy, but that would have meant the flag would have gone up in 1961, not 1962. It is more likely that the Confederate flag was a symbol of protest against federally mandated desegregation efforts. It's an in-your-face reminder of what some in the South have been willing to sacrifice for "state's rights" which have all too often translated into the subjugation of African American people.
Legal segregation has been abolished, but too many Southerners have a Confederate mentality that fails to recognize the rights of African American people. In South Carolina, for example, a state that is fully one-third African American, not one of five justices on the State Supreme Court is African American. Says David Swinton, "The Confederate flag, and the ideology it represent, allows people to discount the interests of African American people". I'm with him - that flag is a flagrant symbol of disrespect and disregard for African American people, especially when displayed on public property.
The Confederate flag, or versions or derivations of it fly over three states - South Carolina, Mississippi, and Georgia. But a Confederate mentality prevails in many other parts of our nation. That an 8 percent black unemployment rate is acceptable in prosperity, that sentencing disparity is shrugged off as "just the way it is", that black men are routinely shot by white policemen, are all indicators of our nation's Confederate mentality. The South Carolina flag needs to come down, but the Confederate mentality that tolerates racism must be battled with the same energy it has taken to turn a spotlight on the flag.